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forwardemail
forwardemail.net
JavaScript2020–2023
forwardemail / forwardemail.net

forwardemail.net

Open-source, privacy-focused email service for custom domains. Free email forwarding, encrypted mailboxes (IMAP/POP3), SMTP sending, calendars and contacts (CalDAV/CardDAV), webhooks, and an email API. Self-host it with Docker. A private alternative to Gmail, Mailchimp, and SendGrid.

3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Open-source, privacy-focused email service for custom domains. Free email forwarding, encrypted mailboxes (IMAP/POP3), SMTP sending, calendars and contacts (CalDAV/CardDAV), webhooks, and an email API. Self-host it with Docker. A private alternative to Gmail, Mailchimp, and SendGrid.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-06-30 16:51:50 UTC to 2023-11-24 19:53:22 UTC.

0122020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

1 sources
Correct, the former. There are no other open-source email servers (or closed even) that does the former that we know of. The deep-dive write-up is here if you want to read more https://forwardemail.net/encrypted-email. Edit: It matters because if someone has access to the filesystem, or our MongoDB database, then they still can't read/write to your email mailbox because they don't have your IMAP password (which we only show to you _once_ for 30 seconds and render in-memory). We use ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption on the SQLite mailboxes (which is generally considered quantum-secure[0]). Passwords are generated[1] via Node.js `crypto.pbkdf2`. [0]: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/90311 [1]: https://github.com/forwardemail/forwardemail.net/blob/d537fc...
In Mail-in-a-Box: a mail server in a box

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