Mullvad is removing port forwarding (https://mullvad.net/fr/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/). Is there a credible alternative ?
Why would you want to replace Mullvad? Did they do something bad?
They’re removing Port Forwarding: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.
The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.
We have removed the ability to add port forwards on all accounts.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat for a second: I have a heck of a time believing other VPN providers haven’t encountered the same issues as Mullvad and to me, this signals that Mullvad’s competitors are working with, lets say, organizations that would be highly interested in what you’re doing.
Sorry but I’m confused. You saying Mullvad has more integrity or less?
I think he’s saying that all VPNs that do port forward will interest governments/police and the ones that are still operating are probably only operating because they got a deal to not be prosecuted in exchange of letting those entities see the traffic. Mullvad being Mullvad, they will never do that so instead of having all those legals threats, they just shut down the port-forward service. Tbh I’m surprised it ran as long as it did.
How does this affect a torrent service using a deluge container for example?
Thanks for clarifying to @brownbreadboy!
The only way I would use port forwarding via other providers is if I was wanting to share something that I only didn’t want my ISP to know about.
Dang, that’s awesome. I honestly didn’t know mullvad or even vpn’s at that do port forwarding and really don’t understand the need to.
More integrity. @CodeGameEat’s response perfectly says what I intended.
I’m testing now AirVPN and will decide after trying both parallel.
Would you mind reporting back your findings here? :)
I was an AirVPN user for a number of years until Mullvad came around. I switched to Mullvad and stuck with them for a few years. However, now that Mullvad has gotten rid of port forwarding, I have since moved back to AirVPN.
The performance has been solid with all the servers I have used, even with multiple tunnels open. My only complaint is that the IPs on the servers I use are unfortunately blacklisted on quite a number of sites. Other than that, I am satisfied.
What I can already say is that the Eddy app for android worked pretty bad on my Pixel 6. But with the Wireguard app everything is smooth. For my Fedora Installation I can say it works fine as long as I disable DHCP in the LAN config. There are better solutions but I did not dare to change anything deeper in the system so far. Even more as I mostly use my VPN over my router, and that way I have no DNS/IP leakage.
App wise Mullvad was much better.
Thanks for getting back to us!
Do you know if they have a setting for what Mullvad call “Local network sharing”? I.e. keep device with VPN visible and reachable by local network IP.
Sure!
Hi, so far everything works fine! Max out my connection which is not very fast.
Any verdict? Now that Mullvad port forwarding is gone, I am also looking for alternatives. Thanks !
As my first trys did not seed a lot I could not see any difference. Speeds were about the same.
AirVPN seems to be working nicely for the past few weeks.
Sad day
I would take a look at  https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/ and https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-vpn
I second IVPN
Ive heard proton vpn is good, but I’m also looking for a good alternative. Damn shame they’re getting rid of port forwarding
ProtonVPN will probably discontinue port-forward too since it is using Mullvad in the backend
I use IVPN. The last time I looked they also had port forwarding
I second this
iVPN is removing port forwarding too.
azirevpn has added port forwarding:
https://blog.azirevpn.com/port-forwarding/
I’ve unfortunately plenty of credit left in my account ~1y
So i won’t try it out soon.
I’m using a VPS on the cloud with PiVPN. Setting up PiVPN took less than 5 minutes.
Assuming they go by GMT it is now July 1 and as of this moment port forwarding still works
Edit: Yup as of July 3, port forwarding is gone. Just checked using telnet and it no longer works. Also Mullvad website no longer has the port check function.
