An ImprovMX alternative that does more than forward

The actual difference

ImprovMX is an email forwarder. Mail arrives at your domain and is relayed to a mailbox you already own. The product ends there, deliberately — that focus is why it is simple and why it works.

MXcatch treats an incoming message as an event rather than something to be redirected. Forwarding is one of four things it can do with that event; the others are storing it, posting it somewhere, and handing it to your code as signed JSON.

That difference only matters if you have a use for it. If your requirement is genuinely "mail to hello@my-domain.com should reach my Gmail", both products solve it and ImprovMX has years more track record doing so.

Reasons to switch

You want the mail without giving it to Gmail

Forwarding always requires a destination mailbox. MXcatch includes a webmail inbox on every plan, including free, so an address can exist and be readable without an account at a mailbox provider first.

You need the mail as data

This is the big one. ImprovMX has no webhook. If you want invoices@ to hit your accounting system, or a support address to open a ticket, forwarding leaves you polling IMAP on the far end. MXcatch POSTs the parsed message — decoded body, headers, attachments as signed URLs — with an HMAC signature and five retries.

You need to keep the mail

Forwarded mail lives wherever it was forwarded to, subject to that provider's retention. An archive action writes the raw .eml and every attachment to EU object storage, filed by date, under a prefix you choose.

You want to route on content

ImprovMX routes by address. MXcatch adds rules that match on sender, recipient, subject or body — with contains, equals, starts/ends with, or a regular expression — so one address can fan out several ways.

You want the data in the EU

Servers in Germany, object storage in Amsterdam.

Reasons to stay

Three of them, and they are real:

• You need to send mail as your domain. ImprovMX offers SMTP sending on its paid plans. MXcatch is inbound only and has no plans to change that. If replying as hello@your-domain.com is the requirement, this is decisive.
• You want a long track record. ImprovMX has been running for years with a large user base. MXcatch is small and new. For something as unforgiving as mail delivery, that is a legitimate thing to weigh.
• Forwarding is genuinely all you need. Nothing on this page beats "it already works".

Migrating

1. Lower your MX TTL a day ahead, to 300 seconds, so the cutover is quick.
2. Add the domain in MXcatch and recreate your aliases and their forwarding destinations. Nothing is live yet — the MX records still point at ImprovMX.
3. Swap the MX records to mx1.mxcatch.net at priority 10 and mx2.mxcatch.net at priority 20, removing the old ones. Per-provider steps.
4. Send a test message and confirm it appears in the inbox and reaches the forwarding destination.
5. Add anything extra — webhook, archive, Slack — once the basics are confirmed.

In-flight mail during the swap goes to whichever server the sender's resolver saw. With a short TTL that window is minutes, and the worst case is a retry from the sending server rather than a lost message.

Other comparisons

Also worth looking at: Cloudflare Email Routing if your DNS is already at Cloudflare, and Mailgun Routes if you need outbound sending in the same account.