A practical comparison of the best self-hosted email forwarding tools: architecture, cost, and which open source email forwarding tool fits a Cloudflare-based setup.
If you want an open source email forwarding tool you run yourself, the options fall into two camps: full mail servers (Postfix-based) and lightweight forwarders built on Cloudflare. For most people, the second camp wins.
A self-hosted email forwarding tool on Cloudflare gives you the best of both worlds: self-hosted (your account, your data) and managed (a panel instead of config files). You keep one catch-all rule in Email Routing; the tool handles matching, filtering, storing and counting — with an MIT license and zero server maintenance.
InboxFly is built exactly this way: open source email forwarding with a real management panel, deployable to your own Cloudflare account in minutes.
Is a Cloudflare-based forwarder reliable? Yes — Cloudflare Email Routing is production infrastructure, and Workers process mail synchronously with fail-open fallbacks.
Can I migrate from ForwardEmail or a Postfix setup? Usually yes: point the MX records to Cloudflare Email Routing, import your rules, and update your destination addresses.