Forward Email is the closest thing to us in shape, and on most measures it's ahead. Both are free, both require a domain you own, both forward rather than host. Forward Email is open source, self-hostable, has run since 2017, and its free tier covers unlimited aliases across unlimited domains. We add per-alias spam attribution and leak alerts naming the new sender. If you want auditable infrastructure, pick Forward Email; if you want to know which company sold you out, pick us.
Feature comparison
| Forward Email Free | Forward Email Enhanced | Don't SPAM Me | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $3/month | $0 + your domain |
| Custom domain | ✓ Required | ✓ Required | ✓ Required |
| Domains | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1 active |
| Aliases | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Catch-all | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ Always on |
| Aliases auto-create on first mail | Via catch-all | Via catch-all | ✓ Default behaviour |
| Send / reply from alias | ✗ Forwarding only | ✓ SMTP, 9000+/month | ✗ Not yet |
| Mailbox storage | ✗ | 10 GB pooled | ✗ — forwards to your inbox |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| API | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Webhooks | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mobile app | ✗ | ✗ | iOS |
| Per-alias spam attribution | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leak alerts naming the new sender | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Disable behaviour | Stops forwarding | Stops forwarding | Hard SMTP 550, attempts logged |
Where Forward Email is better
Four things, and one of them is structural rather than a feature.
- It's open source and self-hostable. You can read the routing code, and if you stop trusting the hosted service you can run it yourself without changing a single address. That is a stronger portability guarantee than ours — we give you domain portability, they give you domain portability plus an exit from the software.
- Unlimited domains on the free tier. We support one active domain per account. If you separate work, personal and a side project across three domains, that's three accounts with us and one with them.
- Longer track record. It has been running since 2017. We launched this year, and for infrastructure that sits in the delivery path of your mail, that difference is a legitimate reason to prefer them.
- A paid tier that adds sending. $3/month buys SMTP, so you can send and reply from the alias. We have no equivalent at any price.
Where Don't SPAM Me is different
Attribution is the whole point
Both products give you unlimited addresses on your own domain. Only one keeps a record of what happened to each one.
Every alias carries its own spam statistics. When a sender that isn't the original signup company first mails an alias, you get an email and a push alert naming the new sender's domain. Over time that builds into a list of companies whose addresses started receiving mail from parties they were never given to — the evidence trail rather than the inference.
With Forward Email you can work this out yourself by noticing which alias the spam arrived on, which is the same signal. The difference is that we watch for it and tell you, and keep the history.
Nothing to configure per alias
Catch-all is always on and is the only mode. You type a new address into a form and it starts working when the first message arrives. Forward Email supports catch-all too, so this is a difference of default rather than capability — but their model expects you to define aliases, and ours has no definition step at all.
Disable is a hard bounce
Mail to a disabled alias gets an SMTP 550 rather than being accepted and dropped. Mailing platforms treat repeated hard bounces as grounds to suppress an address, so the rejection does some of the unsubscribing for you, and we log the blocked attempts so you can see who kept trying. Why that distinction matters.
How to choose
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want to audit or self-host the software | Forward Email |
| Need aliases across several domains | Forward Email |
| Need to send or reply from an alias | Forward Email Enhanced |
| Want the longest operating history | Forward Email |
| Want an API or webhooks | Forward Email |
| Want to know which company leaked each address | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want alerting when an alias is passed on | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want an iOS app | Don't SPAM Me |
The verdict
This is the comparison on this site where we're least comfortable, because Forward Email is a genuinely excellent piece of infrastructure and the honest answer for a lot of readers is "use theirs".
If your priority is that the plumbing be auditable and escapable, they win outright and it isn't close — open source plus self-hosting is a guarantee we can't match by promising anything. If you need to reply from an alias, they win, because we don't do it at all.
The case for us is narrow and specific: you want per-address forwarding and you want the service to tell you when an address has been passed on, by name, without you having to notice it yourself. That's the feature we built the product around, and nobody in this category ships it.
Both of us put the aliases on a domain you own, so the decision is also reversible. Moving between the two costs a DNS change, not a re-addressing exercise — which is the main practical reason to prefer either of us over a provider-hosted alias service.
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