If you own a domain and want mail to arrive at it, you have two broad options. You can buy mailboxes, which is a per-person monthly cost forever, or you can point the domain at a forwarding service and let everything land in an inbox you already read. ImprovMX exists for the second option. It has been doing that one job for years, and it does it well and cheaply.
Before anything else, the disclosure. We build YeyMail, an email alias service, and ImprovMX competes with us for some of the same readers. Weigh this review accordingly. We have tried to make it the fairest page about ImprovMX that a competitor could write, which means saying plainly where they beat us, and there is more than one place where they do. Everything below was checked against ImprovMX's own pages on 20 August 2026.
Prices and limits move. If you are about to commit money or a domain based on a number here, open their pricing page and confirm it first. Where their pages do not answer a question, this review says so rather than guessing.
What ImprovMX actually is
ImprovMX is domain email forwarding. You add a domain, point its MX records at their servers, and mail addressed to that domain is relayed to whatever inbox you nominate. Their generic DNS guide gives the records: mx1.improvmx.com at priority 10, mx2.improvmx.com at priority 20, and a TXT record reading v=spf1 include:spf.improvmx.com ~all. That is the whole configuration. If you have ever set up DNS for a domain, this takes a few minutes, and their per-registrar guides cover Cloudflare, Porkbun, Hostgator and a long list of others.
When you add a domain, ImprovMX creates a catch-all alias by default, so every address at the domain works from the moment DNS propagates. That is a real convenience and worth noting early, because catch-all is a paid feature at plenty of services including ours. If you have not used one before, we wrote about what a catch-all address does and where it hurts, because unlimited addresses and unlimited spam surface are the same feature seen from two sides.
Beyond plain forwarding they offer regex aliases, forwarding one alias to several destinations, per-domain routing rules, email logs for troubleshooting, webhooks on paid tiers, and an API. Their own marketing claims average forwarding in under five seconds, a 99.99% SLA and 200,000 users. Those are their figures rather than measurements we have taken, and we report them as claims.
The free tier, in precise detail
The free plan is why ImprovMX shows up in so many recommendations, and it is genuinely usable rather than a crippled demo. Their pricing page lists it as:
- 1 domain
- 25 aliases
- 500 emails forwarded per day
- 7-day email log retention
- 99% uptime guarantee
- API access
- Standard email and chat support
Read that list for what is missing as much as for what is there. There is no SMTP sending on the free plan, which is the usual catch with forwarding services and the one that surprises people most. Note also that their pricing page attaches a 99% uptime guarantee to Free, Premium and Pro alike, and lists 99.99% only for Enterprise, while the homepage advertises a 99.99% SLA over the past 90 days. The headline number is not the number attached to any of the ordinary plans. For a hobby domain, a side project, or a family domain where a few people want a decent address and nobody needs to send from it, 25 aliases and 500 forwards a day is more headroom than most such domains ever use.
The paid tiers and what they cost
There are four paid options, one of which is annual only. Prices below are as listed today, with monthly plans offering 15% off when billed yearly.
| Plan | Price | Domains | Aliases | Forwards/day | SMTP sends |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 | 25 | 500 | None |
| Light | $50 per year | Up to 5 | 25 per domain | 5,000 | 25 per day |
| Premium | $9 per month | Up to 30 | 100 per domain | 5,000 | 6,000 per month |
| Pro | $24 per month | Up to 100 | 200 per domain | 15,000 | 30,000 per month |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Premium adds 10 rules per domain, email log retention up to 180 days, email webhooks and priority support. Pro raises rules to 50 per domain. Enterprise adds a dedicated account manager and support SLAs. The Light plan at $50 a year has its own guide on their site and is the tier most single-domain owners who need a little sending should look at first. Their pricing page also states that if you pay and decide it is not for you, support will issue a full refund.
Sending as the address, and at which tier
This is the question that decides the plan for most people, so be clear about it. Forwarding gets mail in. It does not get mail out. If someone writes to hello@yourdomain and you hit reply in Gmail, the reply leaves from your real Gmail address unless you have SMTP credentials configured. ImprovMX sells that capability with the paid plans rather than as part of the free product: no SMTP on Free, 25 sends per day on Light, 6,000 sends per month on Premium and 30,000 per month on Pro.
Their SMTP page describes the service as a premium plan feature, says sending uses a rotating pool of IP addresses for deliverability, and states plainly that it is not designed for bulk mailing or mass email campaigns. That is the right warning to give. Once you have credentials, the setup is the standard one, adding the address as a send-as identity in your mail client, much like sending from an alias in Gmail. If you want a domain address that can hold a two-way conversation, budget for a paid tier from the start.
What their pages say about a lapsed subscription
Their pricing page addresses cancellation: you can cancel from the account interface at any time, and after cancellation you keep access to paid features until the end of the billing cycle. That is clear and fair as far as it goes.
What their pages do not say, at least not anywhere we could find today, is what becomes of the domains and aliases that sit above the free plan's caps once that cycle ends. If you are running eight domains on Premium and stop paying, the free tier allows one. Whether the other seven pause, keep forwarding, or stop accepting mail is not stated. We are not going to invent an answer. Ask their support before you cancel, and read our general note on what happens when you stop paying an alias provider, because this is the most under-documented corner of the whole category, ours included until we wrote it down.
Domain forwarding and per-alias aliasing are different products
It is easy to assume a forwarding service and an alias service are the same thing with different branding. They are not, and the difference is worth understanding before you pick either. ImprovMX routes a domain. The unit it manages is the domain: rules are per domain, logs are per domain, limits are counted per domain. Addresses within it are entries in a routing table, and with a catch-all in place, addresses exist without you creating them at all.
An alias service manages the address. Each one is a first-class object with its own switch, its own delivery log, its own lifecycle and its own record of who you handed it to. That matters at exactly one moment: when a company you gave an address to leaks it, and you want that specific address dead within seconds without disturbing the other two hundred. On a routing table you delete an entry or add a blocking rule. With per-address control you turn one thing off and read the log of exactly who had been mailing it. If that distinction is new, what an email alias is covers it properly.
What ImprovMX does well
Several things, and they are not small.
- A free tier that is usable for a real domain rather than a demo: one domain, 25 aliases and 500 forwards a day, at $0.
- Catch-all created by default the moment you add a domain, according to their own guide.
- Domain counts far beyond what most alias services offer: 30 on Premium, 100 on Pro.
- Setup that is genuinely two DNS records, with per-registrar guides for the common hosts.
- A clear logging position: they state they never log the content of the emails they forward, keep debugging logs for 7 days and account activity for 365 days, and do not sell data.
Who should just use ImprovMX
A lot of readers, honestly. If what you want is mail at your own domain without paying for mailboxes, and the addresses are stable ones like hello@, invoices@ and your own name, ImprovMX is the straightforward answer. It is also the answer for agencies and developers holding dozens of client domains, where 30 or 100 domains on a single bill is the deciding feature. And it is the answer for anyone whose priority is the lowest possible friction between owning a domain and reading mail at it.
It is a weaker fit if the addresses are disposable rather than permanent, if you create a new one for every signup, or if what you actually want is the ability to kill one address the day it turns up in a breach and see exactly what had been arriving at it.
How it compares with what we build
YeyMail is the per-address product described above, and the honest comparison is a trade. ImprovMX gives you more domains, a free tier and free catch-all. We have no free tier at all: Starter is $0.99 a month or $9.48 a year, Plus is $4.99 a month or $47.88 a year, and catch-all is a Plus feature on domains you own. There is a free 7-day trial with no card, though it is capped at 20 forwarded messages a day, which makes it a trial rather than a free plan.
What we give back is per-address control. Every alias has its own activity view and its own kill switch, which refuses mail at SMTP time with "no such address" so nothing is queued or filtered, is never paywalled, and keeps working after you cancel. Replies need no setup, because the reply address is rewritten on every forward, with the documented exception that reply-all reaches the other recipients from your real account. Aliases are unlimited on domains you own. We hold no SOC 2, no ISO certification and no third-party audit, and if that is your bar, neither of us clears it. Compare both against the field in our roundup of alias services.