Forward Email
forwardemail.net
Open-source, privacy-focused email forwarding and hosting for custom domains with IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
NB
Nick Baugh
Founder of Forward Email, the open-source privacy-focused email service
About Nick Baugh
Nick (Nicholas) Baugh is a JavaScript developer who founded Forward Email in 2017. He was looking for a cheap, simple way to enable email on domains for his side projects, bought the forwardemail.net domain in October 2017 and a month later wrote a 634-line Node.js script that forwarded mail for any custom domain, publishing it as open source on GitHub.
Forward Email grew from that script into a full privacy-focused email provider with custom-domain forwarding, encrypted mailbox storage, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP, unlimited aliases and spam protection. It is built entirely with open-source software, owned and maintained by its original founding team, and has drawn well-known developers as users, including David Heinemeier Hansson for his dhh.dk domain. A major v2 rewrite in 2019 moved the platform onto Node.js streams for performance.
Baugh is also a prolific open-source contributor in the Node.js ecosystem and runs the company with an emphasis on transparency, user control and privacy implemented in code rather than policy.
Products by Nick Baugh
Timeline
- 2017 — Wrote the first open-source Forward Email script and launched the service.
- 2019 — Released Forward Email v2, a major performance rewrite.
- 2020 — Launched the Enhanced Privacy Protection plan.
How Nick builds
- Privacy through technical design, not policy promises.
- Build everything on open-source software.
- Start by solving your own problem cheaply.
Nick Baugh FAQ
Who founded Forward Email?
Forward Email was founded by Nicholas Baugh in 2017, starting from a small open-source Node.js script for forwarding mail on custom domains.
Is Forward Email open source?
Yes. Forward Email is built with open-source software and its code is published on GitHub.
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