The legacy Free plan ends at midnight GMT at the end of Friday 16 October. If you're on it, choose a plan before then to keep your forwarders forwarding.

What's changing

Since early September, new accounts have started on a paid plan. Now the original Free plan is ending too. After the cutoff, Free accounts without a plan stop forwarding mail. Nothing is deleted: your forwarders stay where they are and start forwarding again as soon as you choose a plan.

Who's affected

Anyone who signed up before September and is still on the Free plan. You'll see an amber "Until 16 Oct" label next to each affected forwarder.

Who isn't

• Paid subscribers
• Lifetime deal holders
• Forwarders you bought or were given by a seller, through the marketplace or a transfer
• Short addresses (1-4 characters)
• Forwarders on premium domains, if you've bought access to that domain level

These keep forwarding with or without a plan.

Why

Vend Email has been running for five years, and the Free plan has always been generous. Today, a significant proportion of accounts use Vend Email without paying anything. A small, independent service can't sustain that.

The Free plan has also made us a target. Spammers and phishers sign up again and again to use our forwarding, and we recently came close to losing one of our domains because of it. Behind the scenes it's a constant fight against fake signups, card testers and fraudulent payments.

That abuse costs everyone. Every email we forward costs money to receive, filter, store and deliver. Spam and phishing put at risk the email reputation that every customer's forwarding depends on. And every hour spent fighting abuse is an hour not spent improving Vend Email.

Vend Email is a business, not a charity, and paying customers are the ones keeping it going. In the past few weeks alone they've funded password-protected forwarders, sign-in alerts and scheduled auto-delete. Ending the Free plan lets us put our time into them, and into a service that's reliable and here for years to come, instead of into accounts that were never going to pay.

So from 16 October, it's simple: no plan, no forwarding.

To everyone who's used the Free plan over the years, and especially those who've sent feedback and ideas along the way: thank you.

New to Vend Email? You can still start with 3 free forwarders by verifying your identity with LinkedIn.

50% off, for good

As a thank you, use code LEGACY50 at checkout before 31 October for 50% off for as long as you stay subscribed. https://www.vend.email/pricing

Questions?

As always, contact me directly via https://www.vend.email and I'll do my best to answer your queries.

You can now have Vend Email delete its copy of the mail it forwards on a schedule, instead of clearing it out of your Mailbox by hand.

Open Mailbox → Auto-delete and choose how long to keep conversations: 1, 3, 5, 7, 14, 30, 90 or 365 days, or forever. To be stricter (or more relaxed) about particular mail, you can set your own rules:

• By sub-address: keep +sensitive for 5 days and +receipts forever, on every forwarder.
• By forwarder: use the new Auto-delete card on a forwarder’s page to give it its own setting.

Sub-address rules come first, then forwarder settings, then your default. A conversation is deleted once it has been quiet for the time you chose, so a thread you’re still replying in stays put. Open any conversation to see when it will be deleted and which rule applies.

Auto-delete removes the whole stored message, attachments included. The copy already forwarded to your inbox isn’t touched. Deleting a conversation by hand now removes everything stored for it too.

Also new: the Sent tab now looks and works like your Mailbox, with search, a delivery status on each email, and a page to read each one.

We'll now email you whenever someone signs in to your Vend Email account.

The email shows when it happened, the device and browser, and the IP address. If you have two-factor authentication on, it's sent once the second step is complete. If it wasn't you, the email has links to change your password and review your account security straight away.

Your 10 most recent sign-ins are also listed on the Account security page, so you can check where your account has been used at any time.

The emails are on by default. You can turn them off under Notifications in your account settings.

Thanks to everyone who asked for this. Forwarders often carry sensitive mail, so you should always know when your account is accessed.

You can now lock individual forwarders behind your account password.

Turn on Password protected in the sidebar of any forwarder's page. Its details and messages are then hidden until you confirm your password, so someone using your computer while you're signed in can't see them.

Mail still forwards as normal.

While a protected forwarder is locked, it appears in your list and mailbox with a lock icon. The sender, subject and other details are blurred out, and it's left out of searches and exports. One password unlocks all your protected forwarders for 30 minutes, and you can lock them again at any time with Lock now.

Signed up with LinkedIn and never set a password? Use "Forgot password?" to create one first.

An improvement to the recently added sub-addressing now allows you to add colour coding to the labels within your mailbox.

See original announcement here: https://feedback.vend.email/announcements/sub-addresses-add-anything-to-any-alias

Save the settings you reuse (domain, recipients, sender name, tags and naming style) as a template, then create matching aliases straight from your dashboard. Pick a template, type an address or leave it blank for a random one, and it is created and copied to your clipboard in a single step. Availability is checked as you type.

Tick "Save as template" at the bottom of the new forwarder form to turn what you just filled in into one. Templates and quick create are both available over the API, so browser extensions and scripts can mint aliases the same way.

Every address in your account now accepts sub-addresses. Give out newsletter+netflix@ or newsletter+bank@ and the mail arrives at newsletter@ as normal, with nothing to create first. A plus, a hash or a slash all work as separators, so you have an option when a signup form rejects one.

Each message records the sub-address it came in on, so you can filter your mailbox by it, and every forwarder now shows which sub-addresses it has received mail at. Replies go out from the sub-address too, keeping the thread intact. Included on all paid plans and lifetime accounts.

How sub-addresses work

You can now toggle whether to enable or disable your forwarder transfer pages in bulk.

Before

Marking a sender as safe did not remove their old messages from the junk view, which made it hard to tell if anything had changed. And vice versa.

Now

When you mark a sender as safe, their messages are removed from junk. If you mark a sender as unsafe, their messages will show in junk.

This should make the mailbox feel clearer: deal with a sender once, and the list updates in a way that matches what you just did.

You can now delete conversations directly from your mailbox in Vend Email.

Remove messages one by one or select multiple and clear them out in bulk.