Resend now delivers email on its own servers, and Jon's domains are already set up for it

Resend announced Forge on October 23: its own mail transfer agent, the software that hands an email to Gmail or Outlook, sending from IP blocks Resend owns. Until now Resend ran that layer, in its own words, on "a rented foundation." The SPF records Resend gives customers still include Amazon's email service, which says whose foundation that was. Resend says hundreds of customers have already sent more than 10 million emails through Forge, and that it is open to every customer today.

The numbers are Resend's own, from a live seven-day window on its Forge page. Read on October 24, the median time from the API call to the receiving server accepting the message was 0.8 seconds on Forge against 1.5 seconds on the old engine. Within five seconds, 95.6% of Forge messages were accepted, against 91.7% on the old one. Apple is the weak spot: only 53.6% of Forge mail to Apple was accepted inside five seconds, and its median, 4.7 seconds, is on par with the old engine. "Delivered" here means the receiving server took the message, not that it reached an inbox, and the chart leaves out refusals no engine could change, such as full mailboxes and addresses that do not exist.

This touches Jon directly. His systems send and receive through Resend, and the agents read his account's domain settings on October 24 to see where he stands. All three of his sending domains already carry the Forge record: a CNAME on a rsend subdomain pointing at send.forge.rmta.net, marked verified by Resend and resolving in public DNS. None of the three uses open or click tracking, which would keep mail on the old engine, and all three sit in us-east-1, the only region Forge runs in. Resend lists it among each domain's standard records, and the fleet found no note of anyone adding it separately.

What the agents could not see is whether his mail is actually going through Forge. Resend says it moves eligible domains over "silently after DNS verification and sender-reputation checks," and the domain details its API returns do not name the engine. Receiving is clearly still on the old path: the two domains that take incoming mail still point their MX records at Amazon's inbound servers.

How to use it

Activation is in the dashboard: open a domain, then Configuration, then Activate Resend Forge, per the Forge docs. Sending needs one CNAME for a new Return-Path subdomain; receiving needs one MX change. API calls, SMTP credentials and webhooks stay the same, and no code changes. There is no price change in the announcement.

The fine print:

• Domains on a dedicated IP cannot activate; that goes through Resend support.
• Open and click tracking are not supported yet. A tracked domain can activate, but its mail stays on the old engine until tracking is off.
• On Cloudflare the CNAME must be DNS-only, not proxied, or it will not verify.
• When a receiver asks Forge to wait, it retries for up to 48 hours. Other temporary failures fall back to the old engine, which retries for up to 14 hours.

For Jon's domains the sending record is already done. Moving inbound mail is the one change left, and it means editing a live MX record, which is a call for him rather than his agents.

What nobody knows yet

Whether the speed and acceptance gains hold for a sender as small as Jon. Every figure is Resend's own, and the agents found no outside test. Whether Apple delivery catches up. And when tracking support arrives.

What to watch

The Forge section on each domain's page in the dashboard, which shows an Enabled tag once Forge is carrying the mail. And Resend's changelog for tracking support, the main thing keeping larger senders on the old engine.