Mailway is a free email forwarder service with filtered email routing. Here it lets you create custom forwarding addresses from using your own domains and you can control what kind of emails will pass through. If you don’t want to receive emails from certain people then you can create filters and it will forward email accordingly. Basically, it lets you set up a list f rules which will decide whether to accept and forward an email or drop it. All you have to do is authorize a domain to be used via Mailway, define incoming filters, and then it will take care of the rest.
There are some domain’s email forwarding servcies out there you can use but they don’t offer filtering. But Mailway here lets you create a list of rules that will apply on each incoming email. Not only that but it also logs all the emails that it has received and you can see what action it took on them. It has its online instance running as well where you can sign-up for free and use the free plan. But for more confidentiality and to own your data, you can host your own version of Mailway on your own server.
Free Self Hosted Email Forwarder Service with Filtered Email Routing
For this post, I am using the hosted version of Mailway that you can use easily. You just sign up for the free account that allows you to have 100 domains and 100 rules. You can register using your GitHub account and the first thing after sign-up you have to do is add your domain. It will show you the DNS settings that you have to configure in your domain registrar.
After it verifies your domain, you can start creating rules and it will start receiving emails. It will apply all the rules that you have created and will create a log. As I already mentioned that you can create 100 rules, so create them and then it will handle emails on its own.
In the logs section, you can all the emails that Mailway has received so far but it only shows a preview of the mail and not the entire body. Logs make it easy to analyze actions Mailway took on them. Since I had catch-all filter on so it accepted all mail as you can see the screenshot below. You can configure it according to your needs to drop or forward mails.
In this way, you can use and configure Mailway to forward mails to your original email address. You can configure on your own domain to receive mails on and specify rules. Also, it allows you to forward incoming emails to multiple addresses that you specify.
Closing thoughts:
I have used a lot of email forwarding servcies till now but Mailways seems really exciting for one thing that I can host it myself. But the best part is still its ability to manage custom domain based email addresses. You can easily use it for personal as well commercial purposes. The free plan of the hosted version if very generous and if you need more freedom then you can always host it on your own server. The code and installation instructions are on its GitHub repository.
