Will the fully-fledged email service also be open source?

(This is the first time I've become aware of Forward Email despite having run my own forwarding email server for years -- you should do more/better marketing/outreach!)

Yep, everything I create is open-source!

I'd still have to have a mail server somewhere that receives the messages your service forwards to me though? Your service just provides one level of indirection, correct? Edit: and what about outbound email?

We are going to release outbound/inbound SMTP feature soon, so you can use our service outside of Gmail (and others') 'Send Mail As' features. If you sign up (and don't add any domains or anything) I will send you an email when it's live. Or you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the GitHub releases. Or I guess you could just email niftylettuce@gmail.com and I will put you on the list to send to, haha.

Any cheap paid services for this? I'm not comfortable with routing my emails through a free third-party.

We do offer paid plans with enhanced features.

And we're completely open-source, store zero logs, and store zero metadata too. All source code is on GitHub as well.

I formerly worked at DuckDuckGo, and take privacy very seriously.

Privacy Policy: https://forwardemail.net/privacy Terms: https://forwardemail.net/terms

You can delete your account at any time.

Forwardemail.net seems to have paid plans.

Reading through the about and FAQ they also seem to be driven by decent principles.

https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#how-is-it-free

Yep! Both free and paid. We have some pretty serious security principles. I'm the creator, so if you have any questions let me know. All of my work I do is open-source -- and we also have a public Slack channel and Twitter where I post updates. The paid plans are for if you don't want to use free DNS-based forwarding setup, a small fee for unlimited domains/aliases/etc to help me maintain server costs (see the FAQ). I may make Enhanced Protection available for free at some point in the future, but I built it this way at first because the website used to be a simple wiki, and I used the DNS-based setup myself 2 years ago.

Then how are you comfortable routing it through a cheap service instead? Asked more precisely: how do you determine reliability from price?

It's more that you tend to get some legal implications from selling a service vs. having some website with no payment on the net.

Where are your servers located?

Our existing infrastructure is hosted on dedicated (not shared) hardware in the US, UK, and Europe. Our new infrastructure (which will be running on bare metal servers) will be hosted in the US and Sweden (in underground bunker data centers).