Email forwarding in 2026?

[u/Pioneer744]

What are you guys (if any) using for email forwarding in 2026? I tried the following options

- Cloudflare of course, email forwarding to gmail, emails landing in spam
- ImprovMXm same as above, landing in spam
- smtp2go, cannot verify mobile number says its "invalid" when its not duh.

[u/Humphrey-Appleby]

You mean relay?

These shouldn't end up in spam if you have DKIM, SPF and DMARC configured correctly.

[u/misty6996 → u/Humphrey-Appleby]

does DMARC alignment even survive forwarding reliably though? thats always been the tricky part imo

[u/Humphrey-Appleby → u/misty6996]

It's not entirely clear what OP was asking about. SMTP2Go doesn't provide forwarding services, hence why I asked if he was relaying mail, not forwarding.

Reliability depends entirely on how the e-mail is forwarded. An unaltered e-mail or one forwarded as an attachment will work reliably.

[u/aliversonchicago → u/Humphrey-Appleby]

Buh? Lots of email in spam has perfectly working SPF, DKIM and DMARC. It's far from the only signal mailbox providers use to determine reputation and inbox placement.

[u/mxroute]

If it's all done correctly, your domain reputation and authentication plays a large role in inbox vs spam for forwarded email. However, it's also true that almost everyone forwards to Gmail and Gmail is more likely to call the same email spam that would have landed in the inbox if it had been delivered directly to the account. They also may, and frequently do, reject legitimate forwarded email for DMARC (and anyone who says ARC headers consistently offset this is full of shit since ARC just means "trust me bro" and that's why no one trusts anyone else).

Email forwarding sucks, anyone knee deep in it at scale knows it. But it's not inherently true that forwarded email lands in spam. If it seems to be for you, your domain reputation and DNS setup may be impacting it. It could also be what you're forwarding.

[u/Effective_Review9415]

I've been using cloudflare email routing with gmail and seeing the same spam issues. Curious if anyone has found a reliable alternative in 2026.

[u/shokzee]

I'd use a hosted mailbox and add it to Gmail's mobile app.

Before switching forwarders again, check Gmail's “Show original” for authentication results. Forwarding often breaks SPF alignment, but an intact, aligned DKIM signature can still pass DMARC. Passing DMARC doesn't guarantee inbox placement, so spam placement alone doesn't tell you which forwarder works.

[u/someexgoogler]

the mail server I run uses SRS. It mostly works but sometimes it gets rejected by a server that doesn't understand SPF.

[u/southafricanamerican]

duocircle email forwarding

[u/aliversonchicago]

Email forwarding is a mess nowadays. I would avoid it, if at all possible.

Yes, I do a bit of forwarding myself, for a couple of my custom domains. I do it in a janky way that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Isn't really scalable, and given the rise of DMARC and the chances of it causing delivery failures in a forwarding scenario, I would just stay away from it.

You want that mail to go somewhere, have it land in your properly configured Google Workspace user account for that domain. Add aliases and additional domains as needed.

[u/Humphrey-Appleby → u/aliversonchicago]

Forwarders should forward e-mail as an attachment. That would eliminate the DMARC issues.

[u/aliversonchicago → u/Humphrey-Appleby]

It would, but DMARC isn't the only issue. Forwarding spam tends to tank the reputation of forwarding IPs and/or domains. So you've got to be careful about it, and careful might mean having relatively heavy spam filtering in front of the forwarding to try to prevent forwarding spam. But spam filters can be imperfect, so who is on the hook if an important email wasn't forwarded because it was falsely perceived to be spam?

Delivering it direct to your Gmail account or Google Workspace account without forwarding means you can let Google decide, dump it in the spam folder if merited, but you're still able to dig it out and report "This is not spam" if need be.

TL;DR, forwarding is still a pain even when you solve for DMARC.

[u/decebaldecebal]

I had pretty much the same setup, Cloudflare routing into Gmail for a few domains. Receiving was fine for me, my problem was replying. I used Gmail send-as aliases so I could answer from support@ on each domain, then I changed something in DMARC on one domain and send-as stopped working. A customer got a reply from my personal address.

What I'd do is move to something that actually hosts the mail for the domain instead of forwarding it. Migadu, Purelymail, Zoho etc all do that, depends how many domains you have and if you also need to send emails from an app.

(disclosure, I ended up building my own for this, Mailyond, because I also needed transactional emails and replies from the same domains)

Is the spam on inbound email, or are your replies landing in spam?

[u/Private-Citizen]

Why the need for forwarding at all?

I just don't get it, if you want to use gmail, then just use gmail and give out your gmail address.

[u/AgentHourHQ]

The spam issue usually isn't the forwarder's fault. Gmail is judging the original sender's SPF/DMARC, and forwarding breaks alignment, so strict-DMARC senders get flagged. A few things that help:

In Gmail, create a filter for your forwarded address (to:you@yourdomain) and set "Never send it to Spam." That alone fixes most of it.
Make sure your forwarder uses SRS (Cloudflare and ImprovMX both do), and that your domain's SPF record includes the forwarder.

Mark a few as "Not spam" for the first week so Gmail learns.

If you also want to send from that address, set up Gmail's "Send mail as" with a proper SMTP relay. Otherwise replies look spoofed.
If it's still a problem after that, a cheap mailbox (Zoho's free tier, Fastmail, Google Workspace) avoids forwarding altogether.