ImprovMX vs Cloudflare Email Routing: Which Free Email Forwarding Should You Use?

A contact address on your own domain looks more trustworthy than a Gmail address, but paying for a mailbox just to receive the occasional email is hard to justify. Email forwarding fills that gap. This comparison covers the two free options people most often weigh up. It is based on our own ImprovMX setup and on Cloudflare’s documentation; we haven’t used Cloudflare Email Routing ourselves.

Forwarding, a mailbox and sending are three different jobs

It’s worth separating these before comparing anything:

• Forwarding passes incoming mail for you@yourdomain.com to another inbox. Both services in this article do this, and nothing is stored with the forwarding service.
• A mailbox is an inbox with storage, webmail and IMAP access, from a provider such as Google Workspace or Hostinger Business Email.
• Sending means sending mail from your domain address. Forwarding doesn’t include it. On the free tiers, you’d reply from your personal address unless you add a sending service.

The deciding question: where is your DNS?

Cloudflare’s documentation is direct: you must use Cloudflare DNS to use Email Routing. If your DNS is managed by your registrar or host, switching means moving your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare, and every record moves with it: your website’s address, any newsletter tool‘s DKIM records, verification records and so on. That’s a perfectly common setup, but it’s a bigger change than adding two MX records.

ImprovMX has no such requirement. You add its records wherever your DNS lives. BytePicks’ DNS is managed at Hostinger, and ImprovMX let us keep it there.

ImprovMX vs Cloudflare Email Routing compared

From each provider’s official pages, checked 27 October 2026. Limits and prices change, so confirm them before signing up.

DNS records each service needs

ImprovMX: two MX records pointing to its mail servers, plus an SPF entry. Its dashboard shows the exact values to copy.

Cloudflare Email Routing: when you enable it, Cloudflare adds MX, SPF and DKIM records to your domain for you. You then add a destination address, which you must verify through a link Cloudflare emails you. Routing rules that point to an unverified address stay disabled.

How we set up ImprovMX for bytepicks.tech

This part is first-hand. Our DNS is managed at Hostinger, and our newsletter tool, Hostinger Reach, had already added its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. The changes for ImprovMX were small:

1. Two MX records: mx1.improvmx.com (priority 10) and mx2.improvmx.com (priority 20).
2. One SPF record: we added ImprovMX’s include to the existing record, so the domain still has a single SPF line covering both services.
3. DMARC: left as it was, a monitoring-only p=none policy.

The new MX records appeared in public DNS shortly after they were saved, and the site owner confirmed that the ImprovMX dashboard showed the setup as valid.

The test: on 27 October 2026, the site owner sent an email from an outside account to hello@bytepicks.tech, and it arrived in the destination Gmail inbox. That shows forwarding was working for our setup when we tested it. It’s one message, though. It doesn’t tell us anything about delivery speed, how ImprovMX handles high volumes, or reliability over time.

Which one should you choose?

• Your domain already uses Cloudflare DNS: Cloudflare Email Routing. It’s built in, free, and its limits are higher.
• Your DNS is with your registrar or host, and you want to keep it there: ImprovMX.
• You need several domains on a free plan: Cloudflare (once those domains are on Cloudflare DNS). ImprovMX’s free plan covers one.
• You need to send from your domain address: neither free tier does that. Look at ImprovMX’s paid SMTP, Cloudflare’s Email Sending, or a real mailbox.
• You need a proper inbox with storage: use mailbox hosting instead of forwarding.

If forwarded mail isn’t arriving

1. Check the MX records resolve. Run nslookup -type=MX yourdomain.com, or use an online DNS lookup, and confirm they point to your forwarding service.
2. Make sure there is only one SPF record for the domain.
3. On Cloudflare, confirm the destination address is verified. Rules pointing to unverified addresses don’t run.
4. Confirm the alias or rule exists for the exact address you’re testing.
5. Look in the destination’s spam folder, and test from an outside account, not from the inbox you forward to.
6. On ImprovMX’s free plan, check the daily limit. Above 500 emails a day, senders get an over-quota bounce until the quota resets at midnight UTC.

Our analysis: what switching to Cloudflare would involve

Two separate decisions get mixed up here. One is where your DNS is hosted (your nameservers). The other is which service forwards your email (your MX and SPF records). Cloudflare Email Routing ties the two together: you can only use it with Cloudflare DNS. ImprovMX works wherever your DNS lives, including Cloudflare.

To see what that means in practice, we listed every record in the bytepicks.tech zone on 28 October 2026 using Hostinger’s DNS API. Nothing was changed. The table is a hypothetical plan, not a migration we carried out.

That’s 8 records today, 6 of them for email. A move would mean recreating all 8 at Cloudflare, replacing or editing 3, and letting Cloudflare add its own. The work is small. The risk lies in what’s easy to miss. A forgotten DKIM CNAME breaks newsletter authentication without any visible error. A wrong A record takes the website down. Other services may also rely on records you’d have to carry over, such as verification records, though our zone has none.

If you do move, export or screenshot the zone first. Check each record again once the new nameservers are active.

SPF lookups

ImprovMX’s SPF include lists IP addresses directly, so it adds no further lookups. Reach’s include adds one. Our record uses 3 of SPF’s 10-lookup limit. That’s enough headroom for a small site, but it only tells you about the lookup limit. Whether mail authenticates also depends on DKIM and DMARC.

Where that leaves the choice

If forwarding is the only reason to move, moving DNS is more work than it’s worth: both services do the same job, and ImprovMX didn’t require it. The case for Cloudflare gets stronger if you want its other services, such as its CDN, because you’d then be moving DNS for more than one reason.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources (checked 27 October 2026): ImprovMX pricing, ImprovMX sending and receiving limits, Cloudflare: Route emails, Cloudflare: Limits, Cloudflare: Pricing, Cloudflare: Routing rules and addresses.