26 ms·

Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

674 points by tosh 1y ago

Topfi 1y ago
That seems very similar to Resend, which has been a joy to use for my part.
amonroe805-2 1y ago
This is great. I’ve had many side projects with Cloudflare where I’ve wanted a way to send emails as a part of it, and it’s slightly annoying having to go find another service to use to get that done. Having this baked-in will he sweet!
mosura 1y ago
Eventually all Internet protocols will be MITMed by cloudflare. Your single point of interception!
- bilekas 1y ago
  Yeah it's already a known point of failure. The annual chaos is always when they have some downtime. They do offer an incredible service though. Would like to see some competition but it's not easy.
- pluc 1y ago
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-all/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-al... That's great - and maybe I'm cynical - but that's right where my mind went when I read that. Trading income for control isn't a bad game..
  - olivermuty 1y ago
    I have been logging in via ssso on business non enterprise plan for a year. Am I a part of an a/b test or what?
- gethly 1y ago
  Was about to comment on this but you got right to the point. All of this is because people are lazy to build, let alone maintain, their own damn programs and servers.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    It's not laziness, it's greed. People want to build and host their own things but that costs money.
    - sophacles 1y ago
      And this sentiment of "every company should have to run their own servers and pay 'me' to do that at a higher cost" isn't greed?
    - fibers 1y ago
      Is this even true for such a sensitive subject like email where there are insane blacklists/whitelists everywhere in which you are forced to use a middleman either way so your emails enter someone's inbox?
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    A lot more people and organizations would self-host email if it wasn't a minefield. It's not laziness that Google and Microsoft have effectively decided nobody's allowed to do that.
    - op00to 1y ago
      I was part of a team ran EMail services for a ~15,000 person campus of a ~80,000 person university in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a full-time job for a team of people to keep things running, up to date, control spam, etc. It was a minefield 25 years ago! Literal years before GMail was a thing.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Always has been; remember AOL basically reinventing DNS? And always will be.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- neximo64 1y ago
  And then they'll offer to 'protect' you from AI scrapers for a fee and then bulk negotiate against Google, etc for another fee.
  - mosura 1y ago
    I am certain this is the intended endgame. LinkedIn/X style verification to prove you are not a bot once the hold is in enough places. That such a database has other uses would be a happy coincidence.
  - nextos 1y ago
    If you use an old web browser, lots of sites are already not usable because Cloudfare's CAPTCHA will deny you entry. New but non-standard niche browsers are also problematic.
    - pmdr 1y ago
      I usually have the same (residential) IP for weeks on end and there's absolutely no malware or scraping or whatever the heck it is that Cloudflare thinks it's protecting against going on in my house. Yet I still get blocked or captcha'd. Website owners may understandably be appreciative of CF. But as as someone browsing the web, I think it's done a lot of irreversible* damage to the open internet. * I say irreversible because I don't think they'll be looking to improve this anytime soon, but rather add more restrictions.
      - sam_goody 1y ago
        As a website owner who uses Cloudflare after having being DDOS'd, I agree whole heartedly. Cloudflare succeeded to do what Google tried and failed with AMP, and we are all the worse off for it. [Though at least it is not Google, that would be worse.] I cannot afford to be DDOS'ed and there are bad actors that have already proven that they _will_ take me down if they could. So, I feel bad for the internet being walled up, and I feel bad for users that will lose access. And I fret that one day CF may just decide to take all my content and use it somehow to shut me down. Meanwhile though, I hold my nose, cry inwardly, and continue to use Cloudflare.
- safety1st 1y ago
  I dunno, I am basically a dick to Big Tech all the time, give me an opening and I will go after them with gusto, but I can't really find fault in Cloudflare offering email sending infrastructure. The ire should be reserved for if and when they establish some kind of monopoly or other anti-consumer practices, fall afoul of anti-trust law, and inevitably the US government gives them a free pass for criminality like it has been doing for years with dozens of other Big Tech mergers, rollups, exclusivity dealings, etc. and appears to have just done again with Google a few weeks ago. It is fine for big companies to offer competing email sending services. It is not fine for them to break competition laws. Also yes, please do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for me. I may very well end up using this down the road because they say they'll do that for me and I just don't want to think about them in some situations.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    > Also yes, please do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for me. I'm going to take this opportunity, because hopefully Cloudflare will see it, to request they support SPF record flattening natively.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.
  - surfingdino 1y ago
    I started building on Cloudflare, but after their "pay us 120k or else" tactics they got famous for I decided to move code elsewhere.
  - NooneAtAll3 1y ago
    you're right internet is made sooo much better by negating all encryption effort of the last 20 years
  - azemetre 1y ago
    If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.
    - citizenpaul 1y ago
      I would say if the political environment pre 1980s was still in existence that might be true. Today that would just mean the entire thing would unravel as it ate its own tail in the race to the bottom environment we are currently in.
      - azemetre 1y ago
        You can create democratic policies to thwart this. Even something as basic as nationalizing Cloudflare then forcing workplace democracy provisions on it would probably do more good for, not just the Cloudflare workers, but society writ large.
      - 1y ago
- kordlessagain 1y ago
  I approve of this message.
- jimmydoe 1y ago
  Good point, but I guess we are stuck here. I don't think Cloudflare did anything major wrong, most of what they offer have plenty of alternatives, but Cloudflare is able to do a lot for free which really isn't their fault. There are complain about its cache's captcha, I get it, ideally it should not discriminate any human user, but IMO it's an economical problem unless we collectively decide what they do is public utilities.
- matthewaveryusa 1y ago
  Yes, but also you can't send an email in any meaningful way on the internet without going through a middleman anyways so while philosophically you're correct, in reality it's already the case.
  - SahAssar 1y ago
    I don't think that is true for email or xmpp. Could you please explain?
    - implements 1y ago
      You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address. Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if you want to be sure it gets into an inbox.
      - dw64 1y ago
        Having hosted a small mail server for friends for over a decade now, I can only think of this as a myth. Gmail has specific bulk (!) sender requirements, which to my knowledge don’t include a blanket downranking of residential and „VPS“ IPs (the latter are just datacenter IPs anyways). You need TLS, SPF, DKIM, DNS and reverse DNS entries that align, ideally DMARC and that’s pretty much it. https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en#zippy=%2Crequirements-for-all-senders%2Crequirements-for-sending-or-more-messages-per-day https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en#zippy=%2Creq... At one point I misconfigured a relay as unauthenticated and we got abused by spammers for a day. We got put on all sorts of blacklists within hours and got our IPs cleared self-service immediately after fixing the issue. If you just send emails completely unauthenticated, yes they will be blocked.
      - SahAssar 1y ago
        In my experience deliverability to gmail is not that hard if you configure stuff correctly. You need a clean IP and domain, rDNS and the usual email stuff like DKIM, DMARC, SPF, but not much else. Also not sure why you would choose OpenBSD and OpenSMTPD unless OpenBSD is your style. For example I run maddy on linux, which is pretty easy to configure.
- pingoo-io 1y ago
  [dead]
- Onavo 1y ago
  Well, this is their second try at this. They shut down their first attempt after a year (and left a ton of developers stranded). https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...
  - kentonv 1y ago
    MailChannels was a different company that offered an integration with Workers, and then later decided to stop offering that integration. Today's announcement is a feature offered directly by Cloudflare.
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  Email is already MITMed by gmail. 90% of my time managing transactional/marketing emails is just keeping gmail from moving my legit customer communications to spam.
- Faaak 1y ago
  The new Room 641A
- op00to 1y ago
  It's not really a big deal to MITM email anyway.
- TZubiri 1y ago
  I think first they were hugely successful in their DDoS protection product that consisted of a DNS connected load balancer. But now they took the excuse of security to act as a MiTM for everything else, when conveniently, it makes for a great business model to just be slapped in the middle of every connection.
- johncolanduoni 1y ago
  I’ve never understood the evil MITM endgame here. Cloudflare’s ToS and contracts prevent them from doing nastiness with your data without breach, and approximately all their revenue comes from large enterprises that will leave in droves (and some will actually sue them) if they started exploiting it. The thing where they let DDoSers use them to protect their public sites from rival DDoSers is sketchy as hell, but doesn’t rely on having your data.
  - encrypted_bird 1y ago
    > Cloudflare's ToS and contracts prevent them from doing nastiness with your data without breach ... Contracts can be and regularly are changed. Ebay, PayPal, Etsy, Google, Microsoft, ad nauseum all have done this many times. Contract-based protections mean very little if those clauses are non-perpetual and revokable.
    - blackoil 1y ago
      Changed by informing in advance. If they change it to scrape your data to sell it to advertisers or someone, drop their service.
      - rumblefrog 1y ago
        Easier said than done, vendor lock-in is costly to move from.
      - encrypted_bird 1y ago
        As rumbefrog said, not exactly an option if they're the biggest/only game in town or if no one else has a feature you absolutely rely on.
    - johncolanduoni 1y ago
      Sure, they could try adding “your data is our data” on the renewal of a few million dollar enterprise contract and see how that goes - probably a redline with a nasty Zoom call attached. They could rug-pull this on free and small business users to a degree, but I don’t even see how it would be worth it. It’s such a small proportion of their traffic, and the fact that this is even a thing on their platform would scare away regulated customers for sure.
- tanh 1y ago
  Yes, Cloudflare would be the ideal point for spy agencies to MITM things. It wouldn't surprise me if the funding for it came from them. And since they sit in between, many API audit logs wouldn't even flag intrusions because everything would look like you'd done it.
pier25 1y ago
Great move. Will probably switch to it immediately from Sendgrid as soon as it goes GA. Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects.
- richwater 1y ago
  > Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects. With a pricing structure like that it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam. Unfortunately I don't blame them.
  - pier25 1y ago
    isn't this done automatically?
    - sophacles 1y ago
      Sure, and then the spammers figure out how to fool the checks. And sendgrid has to figure out how to detect the new and improved spammers. Then the spammers figure out how to fool the new and improved checks... and so on. The part where sendgrid has to keep figuring out how to make new and improved validation is expensive.
  - bachmeier 1y ago
    $10/year for 10,000 messages/year is 10 cents per message. (Or some other volume at 10 cents/message.) Surely too high for spammers but cheap enough for an app with a low message volume.
    - richwater 1y ago
      It's not about optimizing for low volume side projects. Barrier to entry for (12 * $20) is much higher than $10/year and they figure that was worth the tradeoff of losing small fish customers.
Oras 1y ago
Been waiting for this for a long time! CloudFlare developer platform is underrated. The ability to use queues, cache (KV), Hyperdrive, and R2 (an S3 equivalent) with one line of code is just brilliant.
- pluc 1y ago
  About their developer platform: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-developer-platform-keeps-getting-better-faster-and-more-powerful/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-developer-platform-ke...
- codegeek 1y ago
  I really like CF focus on developers but their R2 is not quite configurable yet as S3. I am looking forward to move away from S3 if R2 can get their bucket policies and permissions as advanced as S3.
  - kylehotchkiss 1y ago
    Could you accomplish your needs in R2 just using more buckets?
    - codegeek 1y ago
      potentially yes. but that will not be a clean solution. One bucket per customer is our rule.
- mtrovo 1y ago
  Same here. Cloudflare products are a really good balance for small projects that could eventually need to scale up. Durable objects is such a cool concept in itself that I don't know why it didn't catchup the same way in other providers.
ahmedfromtunis 1y ago
I've been using email workers for years now. Adding the ability to send emails directly from workers will be amazing!
- davidmurdoch 1y ago
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-... They had it a few years ago, but the company offering the free integration essentially stopped offering the free part. I'm currently grandfathered in to mail channels.
- thomgo 1y ago
  Fun fact, you can actually use the current send_email binding to send emails to verified emails in your account (but this announcement will make it possible to send emails to everyone)
  - boarush 1y ago
    You can also reply to incoming emails from what I know, you just cannot initiate any email directly to prevent the obvious abuse. I wonder how they plan to mitigate that apart from keeping the pricing sane.
gen3 1y ago
>// Classify incoming emails using Workers AI const { score, label } = env.AI.run("@cf/huggingface/distilbert-sst-2-int8", { text: message.raw" }) This is neat but be careful using an LLM to parse email content. The demo is a BERT model which is a good but I can see how someone might swap this without realising the implications Also really nice to see emails from workers, its something I have wanted for a while!
Handy-Man 1y ago
Cloudflare's email routing has been abused by malicious users for so long that I can no longer reliably use it with my domain, most times Outlook just blocks Cloudflare IP ranges and emails never get routed to my Outlook mail box.
johtso 1y ago
Please tell me this supports some kind of idempotency.. I fear it wont. The kind of hoops I've had to jump through to achieve DIY idempotency with Postmark would make you cringe, a shared lock to avoid race conditions, and then using the API to check if an email with the unique id (manually added to the metadata when sending) has not already been sent before sending an email. Being safe in the knowledge that an email with some unique key will only be delivered once regardless of bugs, processes dying mid task, network issues etc. just makes life so much simpler. The risk of sending duplicate emails or at worst spamming your users due to some more nefarious bug is something that you really want to guard against at as low a level as possible. Sure this might not be quite as consequential as duplicate charges through the Stripe API for example (Stripe have always seemed to lead the way with good API design in this regard).. doThing(data) is _not_ good enough for executing tasks over a network that are effectful, have a cost, and potentially risk your reputation if things go wrong. Idempotency keys should far more widely supported!
scrollaway 1y ago
This sounds amazing… basically everyone in the space is either reselling Sendgrid or AWS SES. What other "root" email services are there out there? Even Google Cloud doesn't provide one...
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  Mailjet, mailgun, sparkpost and a bunch of others.
  - scrollaway 1y ago
    Mailjet / Mailgun are one and the same service and since the acquisition, I haven't heard of anyone still happy with them. But yes good point, Mailjet is another one. Sparkpost to my knowledge is built on SES.
    - iamacyborg 1y ago
      Sparkpost roll their own MTA’s on AWS, they’re not sending via SES.
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  Postmark is pretty good as well :)
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Google's Mail API for App Engine seems to still be available. I think they don't really want you to use it, but there it is.
RandomBacon 1y ago
My understanding is that "Best Practice" is to use different companies for different services (not to have all of your "eggs in one basket") in case something goes wrong with one company and they take everything down. This is what I have... Domain Name Registrar: Dynadot DNS: Cloudlare Hosting: Dreamhost Email: Fastmail Should everything be under Cloudflare? I think they also do domain name registration and now, soon email. Not sure off the top of my head if they do hosting.
- nojs 1y ago
  They do, it’s call “pages”
- hamdingers 1y ago
  I'm not sure what best practice actually is, but each different company you depend on is a different failure point. If CloudFlare goes down half the internet does (which is a problem of course, but not my problem), so from a purely utilitarian perspective depending on them feels like a safe bet.
- ry167 1y ago
  You can't connect to your email or hosting if your DNS with Cloudflare is down. Plus, Dynadot uses Cloudflare for their site, so you couldn't even change your nameservers if CF is down. A random scatter won't protect you from a service like CF / AWS / GCP being down, and most users won't benefit from protecting from that sort of unlikely and major scenario anyway...
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    That's a good catch about Dynadot using Cloudflare. Ideally there would be a setup to avoid having the domain name registrar use a different DNS than me. I'm more concerned if an over-zealous algorithm or employee shutting down an account and being able to just switch that one service to another company rather than losing everything.
- bachmeier 1y ago
  Does Fastmail have an easy API for sending messages from an app? I've tried it before but found it much more complex than an API call.
turnsout 1y ago
I'm currently implementing SES for a new app, but I like the idea of having another option. I wonder what the pricing will be.
maz1b 1y ago
It's unfortunate that email hosting and email infrastructure can really be done only well by major players. The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone. Fwiw, not a knock against CF. I like their products, mostly simple, fair pricing, etc. Just a bit unfortunate commentary on the state of email infra on the internet.
- jasondigitized 1y ago
  Resend was a breath of fresh air for me recently.
- sgt 1y ago
  This is a myth though (with some truth to it in certain cases). I've run my own mail infrastructure since 1999, no issues.
  - logicallee 1y ago
    >This is a myth though (with some truth to it in certain cases). I've run my own mail infrastructure since 1999, no issues. when was the last time you got a reply to an email you sent?
    - sgt 1y ago
      All the time. I use it in production and I have many users.
  - cj 1y ago
    I suspect if you shared more info about your mail infrastructure, it might reveal that what is working for you is too complicated for 99.9% of people to set up and maintain themselves.
    - seszett 1y ago
      I don't think the goal is that every non technical person can host their own mail infra. But most people who can run a server should be able to setup OpenSMTPd with the DKIM filter and Dovecot. It's much easier than configuring postfix like we had to do in the past. To answer a sibling comment, the last time I received an answer is a few minutes ago. The correspondent's email infra is hosted by Google.
cloudflare728 1y ago
This is exactly the service I was looking for. I am using cloudflare email forwarding but couldn't find anything about how to send form data from webpage to email. All the email service that I could find has monthly subscription, no pay as you go offer. Hopefully, cloudflare will offer pay as you go. Is there a way to get priority in waitlist? I don't mind bugs.
lagniappe 1y ago
For fuck sake is nothing sacred anymore
iamacyborg 1y ago
Will be interesting to see how good of a reputation they can keep (IP/sender reputation, specifically) given their historically very libertarian attitude to compliance.
superkuh 1y ago
No doubt cloudflare will refuse to receive emails from any mailservers except those that run special cloudflare extensions or whatever. It'll be a whitelist that's mostly corps only. For "security" of course. And eventually it'll be so popular other mailservers will stop accepting mail from any except cloudflare/ms/apple/etc.
- NetOpWibby 1y ago
  Where are you getting this from?
  - superkuh 1y ago
    How cloudflare treats web browsers and their proposals for acting as gatekeeping for allowing websites to be spidered re: AI motivated corporations. Also cloudflare's near weekly proposals of unilateral protocol features that should be IETF'd but instead they just do and make others do because they're gatekeepers and they can. I expect them to keep behaving as they have and so posited likely 'cloudflare'-like actions for their announced attack on email. I get that most people never feel the discimination and exclusion mediated by cloudflare because most people are just using chrome or whatever standard browser on their phones. But just because one doesn't have the lived experience of discrimination doesn't mean it isn't actively happening to lots of people.
Romanulus 1y ago
"Centralizing the decentralized." --(probably) Cloudflare
_blk 1y ago
This is indeed great. I've been using emailjs dot com for low volume sending so far but they connect to your account and send it through there which is obviously problematic.. Will be interesting to see how pricing for low volumes is there. So far, I've found CF to be more than fair, esp. given their potential for abusive pricing.
observationist 1y ago
It's always shocking to me how many people blindly sacrifice the principles that make the things their lives depend on actually worthwhile. The internet isn't just a thing that happened, it was developed and rolled out under specific principles and vision, and violating those principles destroys the system. The internet doesn't work if Matthew Prince gets to act as global gatekeeper, or if CloudFlare gets conscripted as the new PRISM or NSA censorship and surveillance apparatus whether they want it or not. Given the profit incentives and intense pursuit of control, it's apparent (to me, at least) they're positioning themselves to profit off of the next big horsemen of the infocalypse opportunity. Centralized control and gatekeeping of the internet, private or otherwise, should be shunned. Sacrificing that for walled garden features is despicable. Don't shit in the village well, even if the guy selling bottled water says he'll get you a great deal. There are better ways of doing things.
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  In principle I agree, but in practice - what the better ways of doing things, as of now?
  - observationist 1y ago
    Use other services where necessary, and sparingly. Use only what's functionally necessary, and diversify. Encourage your employer or organization to avoid vendor lock. Don't ever meet with salespeople, stay in charge of your websites and infrastructure. Find a highly disagreeable technical engineer to tell you what you can get away with; you probably don't need the scale of the things CloudFlare, AWS, et al impose by default. AI right now can do all of that for you; pay for the best initially, have it do deep searches that meet what you need, and find appropriate contractors and services. Drop down to the plus tier after you get what you need initially, if the $200+ versions are too steep, but you can absolutely afford one month to plan an overhaul that doesn't empty your wallet. Mandate open standards and bake in flexibility to your organization; pivot frequently and aggressively away from companies and services that don't meet your principles or standards. Wherever possible use self hosting, decentralized protocols, open standards, FOSS software, and pay for expertise over the massive overkill "but wait, there's more!" the conglomerators offer. Their economies of scale serve to consolidate unearned and unaccountable power, often in cooperation with very shady players. Yeah, tragedy of the commons, this is why we can't have nice things, because it's hard, and complex, and actual evil people exist who will absolutely ddos sites and exploit every and any opportunity to grift people out of their money. Cloudflare is a well marketed bundle of solutions for real problems, but it's definitely not the only solution. It's up to you to what extent you compromise on principles - with AI it's becoming much easier to find acceptable alternatives without having extensive domain expertise. Normal search engines are almost completely captured by SEO and big market players, and we have a window of opportunity to use new AI search to find things that defy the status quo. The window will probably close sometime in the near future, but until then, take full advantage and position yourself to not be subject to companies or industries that shouldn't be taking it upon themselves to gatekeep the internet. Also, yell at your representatives about getting a digital bill of rights, protecting the open internet, breaking apart monopolies, and cultivating what's best for the internet, and the world. We have to stop pissing away the good for the convenience of the cheap. /soapbox
lloydatkinson 1y ago
Interesting development. Not really sure I trust Cloudflare on this one, the last time they tried this with "MailChannels" they got a bunch of people to use it and then killed it off a few months later. Still, their blog post was never updated to say the feature was removed: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...
- kentonv 1y ago
  MailChannels is a separate company from Cloudflare. At one point they offered a Workers integration, and Cloudflare blogged about it because we like to encourage such things. Unfortunately MailChannels later decided to discontinue their integration. The new email product is built and operated by Cloudflare itself.
mercurialsolo 1y ago
Cloudflare is the new AWS
- NetOpWibby 1y ago
  I like this version of AWS
  - cube00 1y ago
    Give it time, we always like them in the beginning.
jasonjmcghee 1y ago
I feel like I'm missing something based on some of the comments here. How is this different than from SES? (Why is this controversial?)
- ZeroCool2u 1y ago
  A lot of folks find SES or even just the broader AWS experience unpleasant.
  - jasonjmcghee 1y ago
    Oh sure, a nice emailing experience (compared with SES) seems positive. But there are negative comments like Cloudflare shipping this is net negative, so just trying to understand the context.
    - wiether 1y ago
      The negatives are probably around the fact that Cloudflare is soon to be the master of the web (80/443) If they launch an email service and are as successful, they could become the master of the email (25/465) So soon, they'll be the master of the entire Internet To be clear: I don't share this view, in part because Google and Microsoft already are the masters of the email
      - jasonjmcghee 1y ago
        Thank you for the context
freetonik 1y ago
Finally. My two production projects are built entirely on Cloudflare workers platform, and I dread every time I have to login into AWS to manage SES. I even wrote a note for myself with instructions which buttons to press and where to navigate, like you'd write for your elderly relative who's "not good with technology".
- aprilnya 1y ago
  Honestly this is why I like what Cloudflare is building nowadays. They aren’t just a CDN but rather they’re becoming a full on cloud, like AWS and Azure are - except their developer experience is just so incredibly better than any other cloud
  - SahAssar 1y ago
    My experience is pretty much the opposite. Bad support for common APIs like S3, terrible support for terraform/opentofu, none/lackluster help in support or github issues.
  - aetherspawn 1y ago
    One thing I like about Cloudflare is that each product makes sense on its own, not like AWS: go make access policies in one place, ACLs in another, and before you know it you have no idea how anything works without taking an AWS Certified Consultant course. Cloudflare feels like separate silos, each individually complete and usable. And the “minimum viable path to make-this-work” is usually 1-2 button presses, rather than filling in pages and pages of configs. I also love that Cloudflare is scoped under each domain, it helps keep my projects separate.
- Manouchehri 1y ago
  I documented the process of using AWS SES from a Cloudflare Worker about a year ago. https://www.ai.moda/en/blog/ses-emails-from-workers https://www.ai.moda/en/blog/ses-emails-from-workers Hopefully it’s helpful next time for you!
appleaday1 1y ago
I need to send upto 50k-80k emails per month
codegeek 1y ago
Cloudflare at some point will basically compete with AWS as the entire infra platform for developers. They are slowly building tools one after another. I am really excited to follow how their Containers platform matures as it is still too early.
- everfrustrated 1y ago
  Yup and why their share price has rocketed. Nobody in the CDN industry is making money - a large player went bankrupt recently. You don't want to look at Fastlys financials and share price Cloud is where the money is.
  - mobilio 1y ago
    Yup https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/ https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/
    - ruperthair 1y ago
      Interesting read, thanks! One almost LOL moment for me was at the end of this paragraph: That is also an important part of AWS’s retention strategy: for most AWS customers the easiest solution to rising costs is to simply sign a long-term contract, dramatically decreasing their prices (again, Amazon has the margin to spare) while ensuring they stay on AWS that much longer, accumulating that much more data and relying on that many more AWS-specific services. Hotel Seattle, as it were.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
Cloudflare have great products and engineering expertise, but it starts to get into a concerning territory; what kind of influence over various protocols of the Internet they (might) have.
- cube00 1y ago
  Especially when they decide you've used too much and shake you down for a higher business or enterprise plan.
njsubedi 1y ago
Finally!
citizenpaul 1y ago
WTF Cloudflare you are using a google form for the beta sign up? Sign up to the waitlist here. https://forms.gle/BX6ECfkar3oVLQxs7 https://forms.gle/BX6ECfkar3oVLQxs7 Edit: I see its an email sending service not client.
- wiether 1y ago
  > This really irks me. It shouldn't. They are not launching a complete emailing service, this is just a service that you use to send emails from an app. "Moving" to their service is as easy as updating your DNS records so they can be seen as an authorized sender.
- divbzero 1y ago
  To be clear, Cloudflare Email Service is not a full-blown email provider like Fastmail, nor is it even comparable to email services like AWS SES or SendGrid. Cloudflare already offered email routing and Cloudflare Email Service just adds the ability to send email via Cloudflare Workers, so there’s a long way to go before Cloudflare could be an option for replacing Fastmail.
  - XCSme 1y ago
    What would be the difference if we are talking about transactional emails? Why not comparable to SES?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - divbzero 1y ago
      You know, it might be closer to AWS SES and SendGrid than I thought initially. My first reading of blog post gave me the impression that Cloudflare Email Service was designed for Cloudflare Workers only because that’s what they emphasized upfront. But I missed this piece: > We’re also making sure Email Service seamlessly fits into your existing applications. If you need to send emails from external services, you can do so using either REST APIs or SMTP.
mtrovo 1y ago
Kind of off-topic, but it's such a pity that we arrived at email as the local minimum for the best communication protocol for transactional messages. Having to set up an email service just to be able to enable authentication flows on a new website is such a hindrance that I keep wondering if it would be different if sending push notifications to a cell phone was made an open protocol..
- ectospheno 1y ago
  Spam push messages don’t need to be a thing. Ever.
- pphysch 1y ago
  China was able to pull that one off, pretty much no one uses email there.
  - mtrovo 1y ago
    What exactly are they using? Wechat messages?
    - parliament32 1y ago
      For registering/authenticating to service, SMS mostly. Same deal in Russia in my experience, basically every website/service signup asks for your mobile number and just texts verification codes.
      - eikenberry 1y ago
        So smart-phone is required for everything there? No computer flows for website access? "We" definitely don't want that... but many others do as it takes control away from people.
        gabelschlager 1y ago
        Smartphone is required for everything there, yes. Signing up for services, authenticating yourself (e.g. when entering a train station), payment, social media, etc. Computers used to be expensive and people had less money back then, so most of the country essentially just directly upgraded to smartphones. Many don't and never used to own a PC outside of work.
oulipo2 1y ago
JSX email is an improved fork of the (very slow to be updated) react-email code https://jsx.email/docs/quick-start https://jsx.email/docs/quick-start
pizzafeelsright 1y ago
This is good and I am fairly certain email is dead with AI, hopefully soon. I went from hosting my own pop/imap/smtp email to ignoring it almost completely at work and personal for a variety of reasons. Text messages and chat or X/message boards are all I use now. I have the same ability to deliver messages, content, forward, save, export, and migrate between platforms. The spam in SMS is tolerable at this point.
lxe 1y ago
I hope it doesn't throw you in a mental health crisis when attempting to set it up like AWS SES does.
willsmith72 1y ago
Ahhhh I've been waiting so long for this. SES is the last thing I have to keep logging into the clumsy AWS UI for
cube00 1y ago
> Now, sending an email is as easy as adding a binding to a Worker and calling send I hope it's easier to setup then the current mess of needing to use Wrangler to setup the send_mail binding the CF worker console can't even show in its binding list.
pikdum 1y ago
As someone not currently using Cloudflare Workers, I'm not sure I want to build a worker and figure out how to interface with it though my existing application just to send email. What happened to SMTP?
- thomgo 1y ago
  REST APIs and SMTP will also be available
  - pikdum 1y ago
    Oh cool, somehow missed that. :)
maghfoor 1y ago
I would actually use an email service from Cloudflare. That literally means I don't have to rely on anything else to host my apps. Currently I use email forwarding to send emails to a different email address from my custom domain. This would help a lot
- danielspace23 1y ago
  How is that a good thing? Are we, as a society, forgetting the value of diversification, or just ignoring it because convenience is good? Do you really want to be just one wrongful ban away from being completely offline?
tacone 1y ago
Email sending providers have become a bit of a cartel, with prices usually rising overtime. I am expecting much lower prices from cloudflare.
htrp 1y ago
shut up and take my money!
smacker 1y ago
That is exactly a service I was hoping Cloudflare would provide. Simple binding using wrangler is really a life quality upgrade when starting new projects.
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
Everyone just forgetting Fastmail exits. https://www.fastmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/
- troupe 1y ago
  Is Fastmail in any way similar to what is being described here? Fastmail looks like a replacement for Gmail or maybe Gsuite.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    Sorry... I though Cloudflare was offering full service email (SMTP/MTA). If it is just SMTP outbound email, then SMTP2Go would be a better alternative.
- dewey 1y ago
  Fastmail is mentioned on every email provider suggestion thread on HN (Because they are great, happy user!), but they are not a transactional email provider which is what this product is about.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    By transactional, do you mean a bulk sender? For that, I recommend SMTP2Go.
    - bsder 1y ago
      Transactional like "password reset message".
segmondy 1y ago
Only a matter of time till Palantir acquires them.
keeda 1y ago
What are people's experiences using their current Email Routing service? Mine wasn't great -- right after I set it up I could not get a single test email through to my recipient account despite multiple attempts. No delivery failure emails or any responses at all. Nothing on their dashboards either. Searching their community threads turned up several other folks who had encountered similar silent failures that were never reported on the dashboards or any status page, leading them to question the company's interest in supporting this feature. I tabled that idea at that point as it was not critical. A few months later, I randomly tried sending a test email again and it just worked. However, the initial experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Could I trust it to start routing critical emails? Wondering what other folks here have experienced...
- pier25 1y ago
  I use it with a couple of addresses. No issues so far.
- cr3ative 1y ago
  They enforced ARC without any notice which failed deliverability by about 50% for my catch-all address. I only noticed when someone told me they had emailed and it didn’t come through. I just don’t trust them now. That was a huge misstep.
- jamescrowley 1y ago
  I had a similar experience and backed away from using it - non-spam emails were getting spam filtered without visibility or notification.
NoahZuniga 1y ago
> Imagine a user emails your support address. A Worker can receive the email, parse its content, call a third-party API to create a ticket, and then use the Email Sending binding to send an immediate confirmation back to the user with their ticket number. That’s the power of a unified Email Service. This is/was already possible. You can just reply to an email from an email worker.
- joshcartme 1y ago
  I had the exact same thought. I guess now you could put something in a queue if you have to do non-trivial processing before replying, but that’s not what they wrote
- fernandotakai 1y ago
  i did this exact thing literally 15 years ago with a simple django app -- there's no way they are using this kind of example in 2025 year of our lord.
xp84 1y ago
Question for the Cloudflare people: We use sendgrid today, and create subaccounts through it (entirely with API calls) to allow our customers to add and verify their own domains (with a couple of DNS entries the customer can create). Then we can send out email on their behalf "from" their domains -- with DKIM, SPF, and all that still being happy. Does the Cloudflare email routing product provide this same capability?
baggachipz 1y ago
I wonder what the pricing will be. I would love to have it be where X number are free, then each one additionally will be a small price. I hate having to change tiers based on usage. I would have no problem funding an account and using that to pay for the overage.
joshstrange 1y ago
I’m interested to see pricing and what the backend dashboards look like for this. I’m currently using PostmarkApp for my transactional emails and they keep bumping the monthly price and my usage is tiny. If I could just pay per email that would be better. That said, I’m hosted on AWS so maybe I should look into SES as well if I’m going to replace my email sending service.
- dajonker 1y ago
  I haven't experienced any price increase on the cheapest Postmark tier over the past 3 years or so? In any case they deliver excellent service and as a business earning money and sending emails per transaction it's almost free.
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    In July 2025 they raised the price for me from $10.60 to $13.04 (what was actually charged to my card), I know that is minor but I use essentially 0 emails 9 out of 12 months of the year and a pittance in those other months, not getting anywhere close to the limits. My statement of "they keep bumping the monthly price" was incorrect, they only did it the one time it appears. However my plan is no longer available and the lowest plan they offer is now $15/mo which makes me concerned they will raise my prices again within a year or so. Again, I know we are talking about a very small amount of money but I'm not super interested in staying with a provider that will just keep raising my prices while I have such low usage. I'd much rather switch to a pay-per-use-type service.
mips_avatar 1y ago
I didn't see any pricing, but it would be amazing if they could get close to SES pricing with like Resend levels of usability.
tambre 1y ago
Anybody know if it supports IPv6?
tracker1 1y ago
I keep thinking that Email would be a pretty natural extension process with the workers model in general... if they offered workers that could handle a tcp connection as stdin/out from the application perspective. Especially in concert with D1, R2 and other services. I think the biggest issues would come down to server-side search functionality though. For very basic services, and even most of common IMAP/JMAP, it could be pretty great. Working on an a major email platform is something I've really wanted to do for a while now. (cloudflare, call me)
alberth 1y ago
So will this compete against SendGrid (transactional emails)? Or is this going after Gmail/M365 (personal inboxes)?
- mrshu 1y ago
  This is a SendGrid alternative (transactional emails, potentially with a nice API).
6thbit 1y ago
> Today, we're excited to announce just that: the private beta of Email Sending, a new capability that allows you to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. So many comments here assumed from the title they're offering a hosted email service, they aren't, they are announcing their own Sendgrid.
- stavros 1y ago
  That's exactly why I'm excited. I could really use this.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Please blog about it if you do!
    - stavros 1y ago
      I can, but wouldn't that be a boring post? "I set my SMTP servers to this other thing and they still work"? :P Or do you mean if I get access to the beta? I probably won't :(
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        I have yet to read a boring stavros post, imgz.org for example. I encourage you to keep writing and keep building. Moar sassy knowledge sharing pls.
        stavros 1y ago
        Haha, thanks, I'll write about something soon then!
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  What’s the point of it for Cloudflare? It feels like they’re randomly offering different products. Are they trying to be a full cloud platform like everyone else? If not, then what?
throwaway12345t 1y ago
Email for developers will always trickle down to a commodity, wrappers will get left behind, acquired, or relegated to a small niche.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
From Zeno Rocha, CEO, Resend - I just shared this with the team: Today, Cloudflare entered the email sending market. While I didn't expect this to happen today, it didn't come as a surprise either. It was never a question of if Cloudflare would add an email sending API, but when. Back in 2022, they introduced Email Routing, and it was only a matter of time until they added the sending part. Some people will see this and will want to migrate off Resend, others will say we're dead. The reality is that they are after our target audience, otherwise they wouldn't create an example showing how to use React Email on their announcement post. Still, I truly believe this is good news. Here's why: When Cloudflare introduces millions of users to their email API, they're creating our next users. Developers will run into limitations and will want more from an email service. They will need bulk sending, advanced templates, no-code editors, and a lot more. That's where we step in. Email is not a winner-takes-all kind of market, and that's why we've been able to enter such a competitive space and still thrive. Competition is good because it forces the best product to win. We cannot let our guards down, and lose our sense of urgency. The bar is higher for us right now, but if there's a team that knows how to increase the bar, that team is this. (https://x.com/zenorocha/status/1971260006654742780 https://x.com/zenorocha/status/1971260006654742780)
jlundberg 1y ago
For people looking to self host email, the mox software is surprisingly refreshing. Open source and available here: https://xmox.nl/ https://xmox.nl/
mixcocam 1y ago
I hope they enforce the use of plain text versions of html email :)
xaxaxa123 1y ago
Cloudflare is NSA/CIA.
Velocifyer 1y ago
I thoght this was a service like migadu or proton mail
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sroerick 1y ago
Tangental - could you deploy something like webtorrent which uses seeds, mitigating a DDOS attack? Is this what IPFS would theoretically do, if web gateways were not used?
GutenYe 1y ago
For those who may be interested: I’ve built a project called Guten Email Notification, based on Cloudflare Email Service. It provides a simple way to send notifications to yourself from NAS, homelab servers, or GitHub Actions. You can check it out here: https://github.com/gutenye/email-notification https://github.com/gutenye/email-notification
6d6b73 1y ago
Now we can expect Cloudflare to start blocking emails from smaller providers soon to "block spam'.
xyst 1y ago
better off using your own mail server. Stalwart collaboration server makes this stupid simple. Although dealing with poorly configured mail servers and draconian mail server policies can become tedious. If really concerned about deliverability of transactional or marketing email messages, then relay through one of the many bulk senders. adding yet another cf product as a single point of failure is not good.
SouravInsights 1y ago
I just signed up for the early access! So far I have used Resend, Sendgrid, Loops (for a person throw away project so don't have good exposure) but I found Resend the most easiest, convenient and straightforward. Especially their React Email library made it so easier to compose emails using React components. I really love that. Back then we had to manually craft HTML emails, worry about inline styles, and constantly test across different clients, which was a pretty painful process compared to how smooth it is now with React Emails. One key part of my workflow is validating emails before sending so I'm not blowing up my bills or getting labelled as spam. And since Resend doesn’t support that natively, I'm currently having to use Emailable’s API to check if addresses are actually deliverable. Having that built-in would be a huge plus. And I know it's not usually something that email providers should care about but it would be so much better if Cloudflare makes this a native offering.
aetherspawn 1y ago
Now that it’s possible, for anyone looking to start a new FOSS project… I would like if someone could please make a serverless spam catcher service that runs on workers so we can host it in front of self hosted email. Something like: - Blacklists/whitelists and wildcards - Phishing detection - Spam digest/rollup spam into single email every day with buttons to release - Virus scanning of attachments - Replace inbound links with hosted link previews/malware scans Strategically looking to get off the MS email stack, but this is a big part of it.
- bear330 1y ago
  You might want to check out MailTrigger (https://www.mailtrigger.net/ https://www.mailtrigger.net/) — it's a programmable SMTP server that can even call an LLM before sending emails, so everything you listed is technically doable: blacklists/whitelists, phishing detection, spam rollups, virus scans, link previews, etc. It’s not directly related to the MS email stack, but if you're self-hosting and looking for a flexible, programmable layer in front of your mail server, it could be a good fit. It’s still under development (though already running in production for my own company and a few early adopters), and the pricing page is just a placeholder for now. But the docs are public, and I believe it can cover what you're aiming for. One thing to note: while the website mainly talks about multi-channel notifications, MailTrigger is actually more like IFTTT or Zapier, but specialized for email — when a message arrives, it can trigger smart, programmable actions. You can turn your existing email system into an IFTTT-style automation engine. It supports JS and WASM for preprocessing and routing, so you could, for example, auto-reply with an LLM-generated joke or handle customer support queries dynamically. The website might not fully reflect this yet, but the docs are more complete and show what’s possible.
boredatoms 1y ago
I was hoping this would be a competitor to gmail
- zaik 1y ago
  There are many competitors to Gmail, what do they lack for you?
mastofa 1y ago
https://cloudflare.tv/api/podcast/O3vVD0Zq https://cloudflare.tv/api/podcast/O3vVD0Zq
bumseltagbaerbi 1y ago
[flagged]
steakscience 1y ago
Game changer
pembrook 1y ago
Love this, assuming they come in as the lowest cost provider. But I'm more interested in seeing how they'll maintain clean sending IPs. I have a feeling they grossly underestimate how difficult this will be. I will not touch this with a 10 foot pole for a few years while they iron out all the kinks.
lexx 1y ago
All web protocols and traffic through one company! Hm, how this could go wrong?
tzahifadida 1y ago
I think this is amazingly great. If they can compete with AWS SES on pricing then, why should I work and pay to 2 services if I already use cloudflare and just use AWS SES for transactional emails. BUT and this is a big one. Most OSS already integrates with SES, so I doubt it will be easy to replace, it may take years, unless.... they can replace them completely as is without adding new codes and apis...
simultsop 1y ago
This could enable anyone serve one self with email. Not that it was not possible, but eleminates tech challenges, reverse dns and configs where you need to spiral down with ISP bureaucracy.
sheerun 1y ago
Very strong move, by one of the few fair comanies that can pull this off
bsoles 1y ago
Cloudflare is an evil company in the making. I would rather stop using email altogether than using their "private" service. No for-profit company should be in the business of blocking IP addresses' access to the Internet. I am sick of their "are you human?" and "we are seeing a lot of traffic from your address" shit already.
twothamendment 1y ago
I'm sick of Cloudflare making me prove I'm not a bot - just because I run Ubuntu. I have a static IP. I visit my bank website regularly, can they not figure out that I'm legit? No, they can not. Can't wait for them to get involved in email... looks like I don't have to!
bumseltagbaerbi 1y ago
[dead]
selinkocalar 1y ago
Email infrastructure is one of those things that seems simple until you actually try to do it.

674 points by tosh 1y ago

That seems very similar to Resend, which has been a joy to use for my part.

This is great. I’ve had many side projects with Cloudflare where I’ve wanted a way to send emails as a part of it, and it’s slightly annoying having to go find another service to use to get that done. Having this baked-in will he sweet!

mosura 1y ago

Eventually all Internet protocols will be MITMed by cloudflare. Your single point of interception!

bilekas 1y ago
Yeah it's already a known point of failure. The annual chaos is always when they have some downtime. They do offer an incredible service though. Would like to see some competition but it's not easy.
pluc 1y ago
https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-all/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-al... That's great - and maybe I'm cynical - but that's right where my mind went when I read that. Trading income for control isn't a bad game..
- olivermuty 1y ago
  I have been logging in via ssso on business non enterprise plan for a year. Am I a part of an a/b test or what?
gethly 1y ago
Was about to comment on this but you got right to the point. All of this is because people are lazy to build, let alone maintain, their own damn programs and servers.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  It's not laziness, it's greed. People want to build and host their own things but that costs money.
  - sophacles 1y ago
    And this sentiment of "every company should have to run their own servers and pay 'me' to do that at a higher cost" isn't greed?
  - fibers 1y ago
    Is this even true for such a sensitive subject like email where there are insane blacklists/whitelists everywhere in which you are forced to use a middleman either way so your emails enter someone's inbox?
- hamdingers 1y ago
  A lot more people and organizations would self-host email if it wasn't a minefield. It's not laziness that Google and Microsoft have effectively decided nobody's allowed to do that.
  - op00to 1y ago
    I was part of a team ran EMail services for a ~15,000 person campus of a ~80,000 person university in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a full-time job for a team of people to keep things running, up to date, control spam, etc. It was a minefield 25 years ago! Literal years before GMail was a thing.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Always has been; remember AOL basically reinventing DNS? And always will be.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
neximo64 1y ago
And then they'll offer to 'protect' you from AI scrapers for a fee and then bulk negotiate against Google, etc for another fee.
- mosura 1y ago
  I am certain this is the intended endgame. LinkedIn/X style verification to prove you are not a bot once the hold is in enough places. That such a database has other uses would be a happy coincidence.
- nextos 1y ago
  If you use an old web browser, lots of sites are already not usable because Cloudfare's CAPTCHA will deny you entry. New but non-standard niche browsers are also problematic.
  - pmdr 1y ago
    I usually have the same (residential) IP for weeks on end and there's absolutely no malware or scraping or whatever the heck it is that Cloudflare thinks it's protecting against going on in my house. Yet I still get blocked or captcha'd. Website owners may understandably be appreciative of CF. But as as someone browsing the web, I think it's done a lot of irreversible* damage to the open internet. * I say irreversible because I don't think they'll be looking to improve this anytime soon, but rather add more restrictions.
    - sam_goody 1y ago
      As a website owner who uses Cloudflare after having being DDOS'd, I agree whole heartedly. Cloudflare succeeded to do what Google tried and failed with AMP, and we are all the worse off for it. [Though at least it is not Google, that would be worse.] I cannot afford to be DDOS'ed and there are bad actors that have already proven that they _will_ take me down if they could. So, I feel bad for the internet being walled up, and I feel bad for users that will lose access. And I fret that one day CF may just decide to take all my content and use it somehow to shut me down. Meanwhile though, I hold my nose, cry inwardly, and continue to use Cloudflare.
safety1st 1y ago
I dunno, I am basically a dick to Big Tech all the time, give me an opening and I will go after them with gusto, but I can't really find fault in Cloudflare offering email sending infrastructure. The ire should be reserved for if and when they establish some kind of monopoly or other anti-consumer practices, fall afoul of anti-trust law, and inevitably the US government gives them a free pass for criminality like it has been doing for years with dozens of other Big Tech mergers, rollups, exclusivity dealings, etc. and appears to have just done again with Google a few weeks ago. It is fine for big companies to offer competing email sending services. It is not fine for them to break competition laws. Also yes, please do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for me. I may very well end up using this down the road because they say they'll do that for me and I just don't want to think about them in some situations.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  > Also yes, please do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for me. I'm going to take this opportunity, because hopefully Cloudflare will see it, to request they support SPF record flattening natively.
stingraycharles 1y ago
To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.
- surfingdino 1y ago
  I started building on Cloudflare, but after their "pay us 120k or else" tactics they got famous for I decided to move code elsewhere.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  you're right internet is made sooo much better by negating all encryption effort of the last 20 years
- azemetre 1y ago
  If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    I would say if the political environment pre 1980s was still in existence that might be true. Today that would just mean the entire thing would unravel as it ate its own tail in the race to the bottom environment we are currently in.
    - azemetre 1y ago
      You can create democratic policies to thwart this. Even something as basic as nationalizing Cloudflare then forcing workplace democracy provisions on it would probably do more good for, not just the Cloudflare workers, but society writ large.
    - 1y ago
kordlessagain 1y ago
I approve of this message.
jimmydoe 1y ago
Good point, but I guess we are stuck here. I don't think Cloudflare did anything major wrong, most of what they offer have plenty of alternatives, but Cloudflare is able to do a lot for free which really isn't their fault. There are complain about its cache's captcha, I get it, ideally it should not discriminate any human user, but IMO it's an economical problem unless we collectively decide what they do is public utilities.
matthewaveryusa 1y ago
Yes, but also you can't send an email in any meaningful way on the internet without going through a middleman anyways so while philosophically you're correct, in reality it's already the case.
- SahAssar 1y ago
  I don't think that is true for email or xmpp. Could you please explain?
  - implements 1y ago
    You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address. Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if you want to be sure it gets into an inbox.
    - dw64 1y ago
      Having hosted a small mail server for friends for over a decade now, I can only think of this as a myth. Gmail has specific bulk (!) sender requirements, which to my knowledge don’t include a blanket downranking of residential and „VPS“ IPs (the latter are just datacenter IPs anyways). You need TLS, SPF, DKIM, DNS and reverse DNS entries that align, ideally DMARC and that’s pretty much it. https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en#zippy=%2Crequirements-for-all-senders%2Crequirements-for-sending-or-more-messages-per-day https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en#zippy=%2Creq... At one point I misconfigured a relay as unauthenticated and we got abused by spammers for a day. We got put on all sorts of blacklists within hours and got our IPs cleared self-service immediately after fixing the issue. If you just send emails completely unauthenticated, yes they will be blocked.
    - SahAssar 1y ago
      In my experience deliverability to gmail is not that hard if you configure stuff correctly. You need a clean IP and domain, rDNS and the usual email stuff like DKIM, DMARC, SPF, but not much else. Also not sure why you would choose OpenBSD and OpenSMTPD unless OpenBSD is your style. For example I run maddy on linux, which is pretty easy to configure.
pingoo-io 1y ago
[dead]
Onavo 1y ago
Well, this is their second try at this. They shut down their first attempt after a year (and left a ton of developers stranded). https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...
- kentonv 1y ago
  MailChannels was a different company that offered an integration with Workers, and then later decided to stop offering that integration. Today's announcement is a feature offered directly by Cloudflare.
mips_avatar 1y ago
Email is already MITMed by gmail. 90% of my time managing transactional/marketing emails is just keeping gmail from moving my legit customer communications to spam.
Faaak 1y ago
The new Room 641A
op00to 1y ago
It's not really a big deal to MITM email anyway.
TZubiri 1y ago
I think first they were hugely successful in their DDoS protection product that consisted of a DNS connected load balancer. But now they took the excuse of security to act as a MiTM for everything else, when conveniently, it makes for a great business model to just be slapped in the middle of every connection.
johncolanduoni 1y ago
I’ve never understood the evil MITM endgame here. Cloudflare’s ToS and contracts prevent them from doing nastiness with your data without breach, and approximately all their revenue comes from large enterprises that will leave in droves (and some will actually sue them) if they started exploiting it. The thing where they let DDoSers use them to protect their public sites from rival DDoSers is sketchy as hell, but doesn’t rely on having your data.
- encrypted_bird 1y ago
  > Cloudflare's ToS and contracts prevent them from doing nastiness with your data without breach ... Contracts can be and regularly are changed. Ebay, PayPal, Etsy, Google, Microsoft, ad nauseum all have done this many times. Contract-based protections mean very little if those clauses are non-perpetual and revokable.
  - blackoil 1y ago
    Changed by informing in advance. If they change it to scrape your data to sell it to advertisers or someone, drop their service.
    - rumblefrog 1y ago
      Easier said than done, vendor lock-in is costly to move from.
    - encrypted_bird 1y ago
      As rumbefrog said, not exactly an option if they're the biggest/only game in town or if no one else has a feature you absolutely rely on.
  - johncolanduoni 1y ago
    Sure, they could try adding “your data is our data” on the renewal of a few million dollar enterprise contract and see how that goes - probably a redline with a nasty Zoom call attached. They could rug-pull this on free and small business users to a degree, but I don’t even see how it would be worth it. It’s such a small proportion of their traffic, and the fact that this is even a thing on their platform would scare away regulated customers for sure.
tanh 1y ago
Yes, Cloudflare would be the ideal point for spy agencies to MITM things. It wouldn't surprise me if the funding for it came from them. And since they sit in between, many API audit logs wouldn't even flag intrusions because everything would look like you'd done it.

pier25 1y ago

Great move. Will probably switch to it immediately from Sendgrid as soon as it goes GA. Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects.

richwater 1y ago
> Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects. With a pricing structure like that it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam. Unfortunately I don't blame them.
- pier25 1y ago
  isn't this done automatically?
  - sophacles 1y ago
    Sure, and then the spammers figure out how to fool the checks. And sendgrid has to figure out how to detect the new and improved spammers. Then the spammers figure out how to fool the new and improved checks... and so on. The part where sendgrid has to keep figuring out how to make new and improved validation is expensive.
- bachmeier 1y ago
  $10/year for 10,000 messages/year is 10 cents per message. (Or some other volume at 10 cents/message.) Surely too high for spammers but cheap enough for an app with a low message volume.
  - richwater 1y ago
    It's not about optimizing for low volume side projects. Barrier to entry for (12 * $20) is much higher than $10/year and they figure that was worth the tradeoff of losing small fish customers.

Oras 1y ago

Been waiting for this for a long time! CloudFlare developer platform is underrated. The ability to use queues, cache (KV), Hyperdrive, and R2 (an S3 equivalent) with one line of code is just brilliant.

pluc 1y ago
About their developer platform: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-developer-platform-keeps-getting-better-faster-and-more-powerful/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-developer-platform-ke...
codegeek 1y ago
I really like CF focus on developers but their R2 is not quite configurable yet as S3. I am looking forward to move away from S3 if R2 can get their bucket policies and permissions as advanced as S3.
- kylehotchkiss 1y ago
  Could you accomplish your needs in R2 just using more buckets?
  - codegeek 1y ago
    potentially yes. but that will not be a clean solution. One bucket per customer is our rule.
mtrovo 1y ago
Same here. Cloudflare products are a really good balance for small projects that could eventually need to scale up. Durable objects is such a cool concept in itself that I don't know why it didn't catchup the same way in other providers.

ahmedfromtunis 1y ago

I've been using email workers for years now. Adding the ability to send emails directly from workers will be amazing!

davidmurdoch 1y ago
https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-... They had it a few years ago, but the company offering the free integration essentially stopped offering the free part. I'm currently grandfathered in to mail channels.
thomgo 1y ago
Fun fact, you can actually use the current send_email binding to send emails to verified emails in your account (but this announcement will make it possible to send emails to everyone)
- boarush 1y ago
  You can also reply to incoming emails from what I know, you just cannot initiate any email directly to prevent the obvious abuse. I wonder how they plan to mitigate that apart from keeping the pricing sane.

gen3 1y ago

>// Classify incoming emails using Workers AI const { score, label } = env.AI.run("@cf/huggingface/distilbert-sst-2-int8", { text: message.raw" }) This is neat but be careful using an LLM to parse email content. The demo is a BERT model which is a good but I can see how someone might swap this without realising the implications Also really nice to see emails from workers, its something I have wanted for a while!

Handy-Man 1y ago

Cloudflare's email routing has been abused by malicious users for so long that I can no longer reliably use it with my domain, most times Outlook just blocks Cloudflare IP ranges and emails never get routed to my Outlook mail box.

johtso 1y ago

Please tell me this supports some kind of idempotency.. I fear it wont. The kind of hoops I've had to jump through to achieve DIY idempotency with Postmark would make you cringe, a shared lock to avoid race conditions, and then using the API to check if an email with the unique id (manually added to the metadata when sending) has not already been sent before sending an email. Being safe in the knowledge that an email with some unique key will only be delivered once regardless of bugs, processes dying mid task, network issues etc. just makes life so much simpler. The risk of sending duplicate emails or at worst spamming your users due to some more nefarious bug is something that you really want to guard against at as low a level as possible. Sure this might not be quite as consequential as duplicate charges through the Stripe API for example (Stripe have always seemed to lead the way with good API design in this regard).. doThing(data) is _not_ good enough for executing tasks over a network that are effectful, have a cost, and potentially risk your reputation if things go wrong. Idempotency keys should far more widely supported!

scrollaway 1y ago

This sounds amazing… basically everyone in the space is either reselling Sendgrid or AWS SES. What other "root" email services are there out there? Even Google Cloud doesn't provide one...

iamacyborg 1y ago
Mailjet, mailgun, sparkpost and a bunch of others.
- scrollaway 1y ago
  Mailjet / Mailgun are one and the same service and since the acquisition, I haven't heard of anyone still happy with them. But yes good point, Mailjet is another one. Sparkpost to my knowledge is built on SES.
  - iamacyborg 1y ago
    Sparkpost roll their own MTA’s on AWS, they’re not sending via SES.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
Postmark is pretty good as well :)
jeffbee 1y ago
Google's Mail API for App Engine seems to still be available. I think they don't really want you to use it, but there it is.

RandomBacon 1y ago

My understanding is that "Best Practice" is to use different companies for different services (not to have all of your "eggs in one basket") in case something goes wrong with one company and they take everything down. This is what I have... Domain Name Registrar: Dynadot DNS: Cloudlare Hosting: Dreamhost Email: Fastmail Should everything be under Cloudflare? I think they also do domain name registration and now, soon email. Not sure off the top of my head if they do hosting.

nojs 1y ago
They do, it’s call “pages”
hamdingers 1y ago
I'm not sure what best practice actually is, but each different company you depend on is a different failure point. If CloudFlare goes down half the internet does (which is a problem of course, but not my problem), so from a purely utilitarian perspective depending on them feels like a safe bet.
ry167 1y ago
You can't connect to your email or hosting if your DNS with Cloudflare is down. Plus, Dynadot uses Cloudflare for their site, so you couldn't even change your nameservers if CF is down. A random scatter won't protect you from a service like CF / AWS / GCP being down, and most users won't benefit from protecting from that sort of unlikely and major scenario anyway...
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  That's a good catch about Dynadot using Cloudflare. Ideally there would be a setup to avoid having the domain name registrar use a different DNS than me. I'm more concerned if an over-zealous algorithm or employee shutting down an account and being able to just switch that one service to another company rather than losing everything.
bachmeier 1y ago
Does Fastmail have an easy API for sending messages from an app? I've tried it before but found it much more complex than an API call.

turnsout 1y ago

I'm currently implementing SES for a new app, but I like the idea of having another option. I wonder what the pricing will be.

maz1b 1y ago

It's unfortunate that email hosting and email infrastructure can really be done only well by major players. The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone. Fwiw, not a knock against CF. I like their products, mostly simple, fair pricing, etc. Just a bit unfortunate commentary on the state of email infra on the internet.

jasondigitized 1y ago
Resend was a breath of fresh air for me recently.
sgt 1y ago
This is a myth though (with some truth to it in certain cases). I've run my own mail infrastructure since 1999, no issues.
- logicallee 1y ago
  >This is a myth though (with some truth to it in certain cases). I've run my own mail infrastructure since 1999, no issues. when was the last time you got a reply to an email you sent?
  - sgt 1y ago
    All the time. I use it in production and I have many users.
- cj 1y ago
  I suspect if you shared more info about your mail infrastructure, it might reveal that what is working for you is too complicated for 99.9% of people to set up and maintain themselves.
  - seszett 1y ago
    I don't think the goal is that every non technical person can host their own mail infra. But most people who can run a server should be able to setup OpenSMTPd with the DKIM filter and Dovecot. It's much easier than configuring postfix like we had to do in the past. To answer a sibling comment, the last time I received an answer is a few minutes ago. The correspondent's email infra is hosted by Google.

cloudflare728 1y ago

This is exactly the service I was looking for. I am using cloudflare email forwarding but couldn't find anything about how to send form data from webpage to email. All the email service that I could find has monthly subscription, no pay as you go offer. Hopefully, cloudflare will offer pay as you go. Is there a way to get priority in waitlist? I don't mind bugs.

lagniappe 1y ago

For fuck sake is nothing sacred anymore

iamacyborg 1y ago

Will be interesting to see how good of a reputation they can keep (IP/sender reputation, specifically) given their historically very libertarian attitude to compliance.

superkuh 1y ago

No doubt cloudflare will refuse to receive emails from any mailservers except those that run special cloudflare extensions or whatever. It'll be a whitelist that's mostly corps only. For "security" of course. And eventually it'll be so popular other mailservers will stop accepting mail from any except cloudflare/ms/apple/etc.

NetOpWibby 1y ago
Where are you getting this from?
- superkuh 1y ago
  How cloudflare treats web browsers and their proposals for acting as gatekeeping for allowing websites to be spidered re: AI motivated corporations. Also cloudflare's near weekly proposals of unilateral protocol features that should be IETF'd but instead they just do and make others do because they're gatekeepers and they can. I expect them to keep behaving as they have and so posited likely 'cloudflare'-like actions for their announced attack on email. I get that most people never feel the discimination and exclusion mediated by cloudflare because most people are just using chrome or whatever standard browser on their phones. But just because one doesn't have the lived experience of discrimination doesn't mean it isn't actively happening to lots of people.

Romanulus 1y ago

"Centralizing the decentralized." --(probably) Cloudflare

_blk 1y ago

This is indeed great. I've been using emailjs dot com for low volume sending so far but they connect to your account and send it through there which is obviously problematic.. Will be interesting to see how pricing for low volumes is there. So far, I've found CF to be more than fair, esp. given their potential for abusive pricing.

observationist 1y ago

It's always shocking to me how many people blindly sacrifice the principles that make the things their lives depend on actually worthwhile. The internet isn't just a thing that happened, it was developed and rolled out under specific principles and vision, and violating those principles destroys the system. The internet doesn't work if Matthew Prince gets to act as global gatekeeper, or if CloudFlare gets conscripted as the new PRISM or NSA censorship and surveillance apparatus whether they want it or not. Given the profit incentives and intense pursuit of control, it's apparent (to me, at least) they're positioning themselves to profit off of the next big horsemen of the infocalypse opportunity. Centralized control and gatekeeping of the internet, private or otherwise, should be shunned. Sacrificing that for walled garden features is despicable. Don't shit in the village well, even if the guy selling bottled water says he'll get you a great deal. There are better ways of doing things.

BinaryIgor 1y ago
In principle I agree, but in practice - what the better ways of doing things, as of now?
- observationist 1y ago
  Use other services where necessary, and sparingly. Use only what's functionally necessary, and diversify. Encourage your employer or organization to avoid vendor lock. Don't ever meet with salespeople, stay in charge of your websites and infrastructure. Find a highly disagreeable technical engineer to tell you what you can get away with; you probably don't need the scale of the things CloudFlare, AWS, et al impose by default. AI right now can do all of that for you; pay for the best initially, have it do deep searches that meet what you need, and find appropriate contractors and services. Drop down to the plus tier after you get what you need initially, if the $200+ versions are too steep, but you can absolutely afford one month to plan an overhaul that doesn't empty your wallet. Mandate open standards and bake in flexibility to your organization; pivot frequently and aggressively away from companies and services that don't meet your principles or standards. Wherever possible use self hosting, decentralized protocols, open standards, FOSS software, and pay for expertise over the massive overkill "but wait, there's more!" the conglomerators offer. Their economies of scale serve to consolidate unearned and unaccountable power, often in cooperation with very shady players. Yeah, tragedy of the commons, this is why we can't have nice things, because it's hard, and complex, and actual evil people exist who will absolutely ddos sites and exploit every and any opportunity to grift people out of their money. Cloudflare is a well marketed bundle of solutions for real problems, but it's definitely not the only solution. It's up to you to what extent you compromise on principles - with AI it's becoming much easier to find acceptable alternatives without having extensive domain expertise. Normal search engines are almost completely captured by SEO and big market players, and we have a window of opportunity to use new AI search to find things that defy the status quo. The window will probably close sometime in the near future, but until then, take full advantage and position yourself to not be subject to companies or industries that shouldn't be taking it upon themselves to gatekeep the internet. Also, yell at your representatives about getting a digital bill of rights, protecting the open internet, breaking apart monopolies, and cultivating what's best for the internet, and the world. We have to stop pissing away the good for the convenience of the cheap. /soapbox

lloydatkinson 1y ago

Interesting development. Not really sure I trust Cloudflare on this one, the last time they tried this with "MailChannels" they got a bunch of people to use it and then killed it off a few months later. Still, their blog post was never updated to say the feature was removed: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-mailchannels/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...

kentonv 1y ago
MailChannels is a separate company from Cloudflare. At one point they offered a Workers integration, and Cloudflare blogged about it because we like to encourage such things. Unfortunately MailChannels later decided to discontinue their integration. The new email product is built and operated by Cloudflare itself.

mercurialsolo 1y ago

Cloudflare is the new AWS

NetOpWibby 1y ago
I like this version of AWS
- cube00 1y ago
  Give it time, we always like them in the beginning.

jasonjmcghee 1y ago

I feel like I'm missing something based on some of the comments here. How is this different than from SES? (Why is this controversial?)

ZeroCool2u 1y ago
A lot of folks find SES or even just the broader AWS experience unpleasant.
- jasonjmcghee 1y ago
  Oh sure, a nice emailing experience (compared with SES) seems positive. But there are negative comments like Cloudflare shipping this is net negative, so just trying to understand the context.
  - wiether 1y ago
    The negatives are probably around the fact that Cloudflare is soon to be the master of the web (80/443) If they launch an email service and are as successful, they could become the master of the email (25/465) So soon, they'll be the master of the entire Internet To be clear: I don't share this view, in part because Google and Microsoft already are the masters of the email
    - jasonjmcghee 1y ago
      Thank you for the context

freetonik 1y ago

Finally. My two production projects are built entirely on Cloudflare workers platform, and I dread every time I have to login into AWS to manage SES. I even wrote a note for myself with instructions which buttons to press and where to navigate, like you'd write for your elderly relative who's "not good with technology".

aprilnya 1y ago
Honestly this is why I like what Cloudflare is building nowadays. They aren’t just a CDN but rather they’re becoming a full on cloud, like AWS and Azure are - except their developer experience is just so incredibly better than any other cloud
- SahAssar 1y ago
  My experience is pretty much the opposite. Bad support for common APIs like S3, terrible support for terraform/opentofu, none/lackluster help in support or github issues.
- aetherspawn 1y ago
  One thing I like about Cloudflare is that each product makes sense on its own, not like AWS: go make access policies in one place, ACLs in another, and before you know it you have no idea how anything works without taking an AWS Certified Consultant course. Cloudflare feels like separate silos, each individually complete and usable. And the “minimum viable path to make-this-work” is usually 1-2 button presses, rather than filling in pages and pages of configs. I also love that Cloudflare is scoped under each domain, it helps keep my projects separate.
Manouchehri 1y ago
I documented the process of using AWS SES from a Cloudflare Worker about a year ago. https://www.ai.moda/en/blog/ses-emails-from-workers https://www.ai.moda/en/blog/ses-emails-from-workers Hopefully it’s helpful next time for you!

appleaday1 1y ago

I need to send upto 50k-80k emails per month

codegeek 1y ago

Cloudflare at some point will basically compete with AWS as the entire infra platform for developers. They are slowly building tools one after another. I am really excited to follow how their Containers platform matures as it is still too early.

everfrustrated 1y ago
Yup and why their share price has rocketed. Nobody in the CDN industry is making money - a large player went bankrupt recently. You don't want to look at Fastlys financials and share price Cloud is where the money is.
- mobilio 1y ago
  Yup https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/ https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/
  - ruperthair 1y ago
    Interesting read, thanks! One almost LOL moment for me was at the end of this paragraph: That is also an important part of AWS’s retention strategy: for most AWS customers the easiest solution to rising costs is to simply sign a long-term contract, dramatically decreasing their prices (again, Amazon has the margin to spare) while ensuring they stay on AWS that much longer, accumulating that much more data and relying on that many more AWS-specific services. Hotel Seattle, as it were.

BinaryIgor 1y ago

Cloudflare have great products and engineering expertise, but it starts to get into a concerning territory; what kind of influence over various protocols of the Internet they (might) have.

cube00 1y ago
Especially when they decide you've used too much and shake you down for a higher business or enterprise plan.

njsubedi 1y ago

Finally!

citizenpaul 1y ago

WTF Cloudflare you are using a google form for the beta sign up? Sign up to the waitlist here. https://forms.gle/BX6ECfkar3oVLQxs7 https://forms.gle/BX6ECfkar3oVLQxs7 Edit: I see its an email sending service not client.

wiether 1y ago
> This really irks me. It shouldn't. They are not launching a complete emailing service, this is just a service that you use to send emails from an app. "Moving" to their service is as easy as updating your DNS records so they can be seen as an authorized sender.
divbzero 1y ago
To be clear, Cloudflare Email Service is not a full-blown email provider like Fastmail, nor is it even comparable to email services like AWS SES or SendGrid. Cloudflare already offered email routing and Cloudflare Email Service just adds the ability to send email via Cloudflare Workers, so there’s a long way to go before Cloudflare could be an option for replacing Fastmail.
- XCSme 1y ago
  What would be the difference if we are talking about transactional emails? Why not comparable to SES?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - divbzero 1y ago
    You know, it might be closer to AWS SES and SendGrid than I thought initially. My first reading of blog post gave me the impression that Cloudflare Email Service was designed for Cloudflare Workers only because that’s what they emphasized upfront. But I missed this piece: > We’re also making sure Email Service seamlessly fits into your existing applications. If you need to send emails from external services, you can do so using either REST APIs or SMTP.

mtrovo 1y ago

Kind of off-topic, but it's such a pity that we arrived at email as the local minimum for the best communication protocol for transactional messages. Having to set up an email service just to be able to enable authentication flows on a new website is such a hindrance that I keep wondering if it would be different if sending push notifications to a cell phone was made an open protocol..

ectospheno 1y ago
Spam push messages don’t need to be a thing. Ever.
pphysch 1y ago
China was able to pull that one off, pretty much no one uses email there.
- mtrovo 1y ago
  What exactly are they using? Wechat messages?
  - parliament32 1y ago
    For registering/authenticating to service, SMS mostly. Same deal in Russia in my experience, basically every website/service signup asks for your mobile number and just texts verification codes.
    - eikenberry 1y ago
      So smart-phone is required for everything there? No computer flows for website access? "We" definitely don't want that... but many others do as it takes control away from people.
      - gabelschlager 1y ago
        Smartphone is required for everything there, yes. Signing up for services, authenticating yourself (e.g. when entering a train station), payment, social media, etc. Computers used to be expensive and people had less money back then, so most of the country essentially just directly upgraded to smartphones. Many don't and never used to own a PC outside of work.

oulipo2 1y ago

JSX email is an improved fork of the (very slow to be updated) react-email code https://jsx.email/docs/quick-start https://jsx.email/docs/quick-start

pizzafeelsright 1y ago

This is good and I am fairly certain email is dead with AI, hopefully soon. I went from hosting my own pop/imap/smtp email to ignoring it almost completely at work and personal for a variety of reasons. Text messages and chat or X/message boards are all I use now. I have the same ability to deliver messages, content, forward, save, export, and migrate between platforms. The spam in SMS is tolerable at this point.

lxe 1y ago

I hope it doesn't throw you in a mental health crisis when attempting to set it up like AWS SES does.

willsmith72 1y ago

Ahhhh I've been waiting so long for this. SES is the last thing I have to keep logging into the clumsy AWS UI for

cube00 1y ago

> Now, sending an email is as easy as adding a binding to a Worker and calling send I hope it's easier to setup then the current mess of needing to use Wrangler to setup the send_mail binding the CF worker console can't even show in its binding list.

pikdum 1y ago

As someone not currently using Cloudflare Workers, I'm not sure I want to build a worker and figure out how to interface with it though my existing application just to send email. What happened to SMTP?

thomgo 1y ago
REST APIs and SMTP will also be available
- pikdum 1y ago
  Oh cool, somehow missed that. :)

maghfoor 1y ago

I would actually use an email service from Cloudflare. That literally means I don't have to rely on anything else to host my apps. Currently I use email forwarding to send emails to a different email address from my custom domain. This would help a lot

danielspace23 1y ago
How is that a good thing? Are we, as a society, forgetting the value of diversification, or just ignoring it because convenience is good? Do you really want to be just one wrongful ban away from being completely offline?

tacone 1y ago

Email sending providers have become a bit of a cartel, with prices usually rising overtime. I am expecting much lower prices from cloudflare.

htrp 1y ago

shut up and take my money!

smacker 1y ago

That is exactly a service I was hoping Cloudflare would provide. Simple binding using wrangler is really a life quality upgrade when starting new projects.

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

Everyone just forgetting Fastmail exits. https://www.fastmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/

troupe 1y ago
Is Fastmail in any way similar to what is being described here? Fastmail looks like a replacement for Gmail or maybe Gsuite.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  Sorry... I though Cloudflare was offering full service email (SMTP/MTA). If it is just SMTP outbound email, then SMTP2Go would be a better alternative.
dewey 1y ago
Fastmail is mentioned on every email provider suggestion thread on HN (Because they are great, happy user!), but they are not a transactional email provider which is what this product is about.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  By transactional, do you mean a bulk sender? For that, I recommend SMTP2Go.
  - bsder 1y ago
    Transactional like "password reset message".

segmondy 1y ago

Only a matter of time till Palantir acquires them.

keeda 1y ago

What are people's experiences using their current Email Routing service? Mine wasn't great -- right after I set it up I could not get a single test email through to my recipient account despite multiple attempts. No delivery failure emails or any responses at all. Nothing on their dashboards either. Searching their community threads turned up several other folks who had encountered similar silent failures that were never reported on the dashboards or any status page, leading them to question the company's interest in supporting this feature. I tabled that idea at that point as it was not critical. A few months later, I randomly tried sending a test email again and it just worked. However, the initial experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Could I trust it to start routing critical emails? Wondering what other folks here have experienced...

pier25 1y ago
I use it with a couple of addresses. No issues so far.
cr3ative 1y ago
They enforced ARC without any notice which failed deliverability by about 50% for my catch-all address. I only noticed when someone told me they had emailed and it didn’t come through. I just don’t trust them now. That was a huge misstep.
jamescrowley 1y ago
I had a similar experience and backed away from using it - non-spam emails were getting spam filtered without visibility or notification.

NoahZuniga 1y ago

> Imagine a user emails your support address. A Worker can receive the email, parse its content, call a third-party API to create a ticket, and then use the Email Sending binding to send an immediate confirmation back to the user with their ticket number. That’s the power of a unified Email Service. This is/was already possible. You can just reply to an email from an email worker.

joshcartme 1y ago
I had the exact same thought. I guess now you could put something in a queue if you have to do non-trivial processing before replying, but that’s not what they wrote
fernandotakai 1y ago
i did this exact thing literally 15 years ago with a simple django app -- there's no way they are using this kind of example in 2025 year of our lord.

xp84 1y ago

Question for the Cloudflare people: We use sendgrid today, and create subaccounts through it (entirely with API calls) to allow our customers to add and verify their own domains (with a couple of DNS entries the customer can create). Then we can send out email on their behalf "from" their domains -- with DKIM, SPF, and all that still being happy. Does the Cloudflare email routing product provide this same capability?

baggachipz 1y ago

I wonder what the pricing will be. I would love to have it be where X number are free, then each one additionally will be a small price. I hate having to change tiers based on usage. I would have no problem funding an account and using that to pay for the overage.

joshstrange 1y ago

I’m interested to see pricing and what the backend dashboards look like for this. I’m currently using PostmarkApp for my transactional emails and they keep bumping the monthly price and my usage is tiny. If I could just pay per email that would be better. That said, I’m hosted on AWS so maybe I should look into SES as well if I’m going to replace my email sending service.

dajonker 1y ago
I haven't experienced any price increase on the cheapest Postmark tier over the past 3 years or so? In any case they deliver excellent service and as a business earning money and sending emails per transaction it's almost free.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  In July 2025 they raised the price for me from $10.60 to $13.04 (what was actually charged to my card), I know that is minor but I use essentially 0 emails 9 out of 12 months of the year and a pittance in those other months, not getting anywhere close to the limits. My statement of "they keep bumping the monthly price" was incorrect, they only did it the one time it appears. However my plan is no longer available and the lowest plan they offer is now $15/mo which makes me concerned they will raise my prices again within a year or so. Again, I know we are talking about a very small amount of money but I'm not super interested in staying with a provider that will just keep raising my prices while I have such low usage. I'd much rather switch to a pay-per-use-type service.

mips_avatar 1y ago

I didn't see any pricing, but it would be amazing if they could get close to SES pricing with like Resend levels of usability.

tambre 1y ago

Anybody know if it supports IPv6?

tracker1 1y ago

I keep thinking that Email would be a pretty natural extension process with the workers model in general... if they offered workers that could handle a tcp connection as stdin/out from the application perspective. Especially in concert with D1, R2 and other services. I think the biggest issues would come down to server-side search functionality though. For very basic services, and even most of common IMAP/JMAP, it could be pretty great. Working on an a major email platform is something I've really wanted to do for a while now. (cloudflare, call me)

alberth 1y ago

So will this compete against SendGrid (transactional emails)? Or is this going after Gmail/M365 (personal inboxes)?

mrshu 1y ago
This is a SendGrid alternative (transactional emails, potentially with a nice API).

6thbit 1y ago

> Today, we're excited to announce just that: the private beta of Email Sending, a new capability that allows you to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. So many comments here assumed from the title they're offering a hosted email service, they aren't, they are announcing their own Sendgrid.

stavros 1y ago
That's exactly why I'm excited. I could really use this.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Please blog about it if you do!
  - stavros 1y ago
    I can, but wouldn't that be a boring post? "I set my SMTP servers to this other thing and they still work"? :P Or do you mean if I get access to the beta? I probably won't :(
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      I have yet to read a boring stavros post, imgz.org for example. I encourage you to keep writing and keep building. Moar sassy knowledge sharing pls.
      - stavros 1y ago
        Haha, thanks, I'll write about something soon then!
SilverElfin 1y ago
What’s the point of it for Cloudflare? It feels like they’re randomly offering different products. Are they trying to be a full cloud platform like everyone else? If not, then what?

throwaway12345t 1y ago

Email for developers will always trickle down to a commodity, wrappers will get left behind, acquired, or relegated to a small niche.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

From Zeno Rocha, CEO, Resend - I just shared this with the team: Today, Cloudflare entered the email sending market. While I didn't expect this to happen today, it didn't come as a surprise either. It was never a question of if Cloudflare would add an email sending API, but when. Back in 2022, they introduced Email Routing, and it was only a matter of time until they added the sending part. Some people will see this and will want to migrate off Resend, others will say we're dead. The reality is that they are after our target audience, otherwise they wouldn't create an example showing how to use React Email on their announcement post. Still, I truly believe this is good news. Here's why: When Cloudflare introduces millions of users to their email API, they're creating our next users. Developers will run into limitations and will want more from an email service. They will need bulk sending, advanced templates, no-code editors, and a lot more. That's where we step in. Email is not a winner-takes-all kind of market, and that's why we've been able to enter such a competitive space and still thrive. Competition is good because it forces the best product to win. We cannot let our guards down, and lose our sense of urgency. The bar is higher for us right now, but if there's a team that knows how to increase the bar, that team is this. (https://x.com/zenorocha/status/1971260006654742780 https://x.com/zenorocha/status/1971260006654742780)

jlundberg 1y ago

For people looking to self host email, the mox software is surprisingly refreshing. Open source and available here: https://xmox.nl/ https://xmox.nl/

mixcocam 1y ago

I hope they enforce the use of plain text versions of html email :)

xaxaxa123 1y ago

Cloudflare is NSA/CIA.

Velocifyer 1y ago

I thoght this was a service like migadu or proton mail

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sroerick 1y ago

Tangental - could you deploy something like webtorrent which uses seeds, mitigating a DDOS attack? Is this what IPFS would theoretically do, if web gateways were not used?

GutenYe 1y ago

For those who may be interested: I’ve built a project called Guten Email Notification, based on Cloudflare Email Service. It provides a simple way to send notifications to yourself from NAS, homelab servers, or GitHub Actions. You can check it out here: https://github.com/gutenye/email-notification https://github.com/gutenye/email-notification

6d6b73 1y ago

Now we can expect Cloudflare to start blocking emails from smaller providers soon to "block spam'.

xyst 1y ago

better off using your own mail server. Stalwart collaboration server makes this stupid simple. Although dealing with poorly configured mail servers and draconian mail server policies can become tedious. If really concerned about deliverability of transactional or marketing email messages, then relay through one of the many bulk senders. adding yet another cf product as a single point of failure is not good.

SouravInsights 1y ago

I just signed up for the early access! So far I have used Resend, Sendgrid, Loops (for a person throw away project so don't have good exposure) but I found Resend the most easiest, convenient and straightforward. Especially their React Email library made it so easier to compose emails using React components. I really love that. Back then we had to manually craft HTML emails, worry about inline styles, and constantly test across different clients, which was a pretty painful process compared to how smooth it is now with React Emails. One key part of my workflow is validating emails before sending so I'm not blowing up my bills or getting labelled as spam. And since Resend doesn’t support that natively, I'm currently having to use Emailable’s API to check if addresses are actually deliverable. Having that built-in would be a huge plus. And I know it's not usually something that email providers should care about but it would be so much better if Cloudflare makes this a native offering.

aetherspawn 1y ago

Now that it’s possible, for anyone looking to start a new FOSS project… I would like if someone could please make a serverless spam catcher service that runs on workers so we can host it in front of self hosted email. Something like: - Blacklists/whitelists and wildcards - Phishing detection - Spam digest/rollup spam into single email every day with buttons to release - Virus scanning of attachments - Replace inbound links with hosted link previews/malware scans Strategically looking to get off the MS email stack, but this is a big part of it.

bear330 1y ago
You might want to check out MailTrigger (https://www.mailtrigger.net/ https://www.mailtrigger.net/) — it's a programmable SMTP server that can even call an LLM before sending emails, so everything you listed is technically doable: blacklists/whitelists, phishing detection, spam rollups, virus scans, link previews, etc. It’s not directly related to the MS email stack, but if you're self-hosting and looking for a flexible, programmable layer in front of your mail server, it could be a good fit. It’s still under development (though already running in production for my own company and a few early adopters), and the pricing page is just a placeholder for now. But the docs are public, and I believe it can cover what you're aiming for. One thing to note: while the website mainly talks about multi-channel notifications, MailTrigger is actually more like IFTTT or Zapier, but specialized for email — when a message arrives, it can trigger smart, programmable actions. You can turn your existing email system into an IFTTT-style automation engine. It supports JS and WASM for preprocessing and routing, so you could, for example, auto-reply with an LLM-generated joke or handle customer support queries dynamically. The website might not fully reflect this yet, but the docs are more complete and show what’s possible.

boredatoms 1y ago

I was hoping this would be a competitor to gmail

zaik 1y ago
There are many competitors to Gmail, what do they lack for you?

mastofa 1y ago

https://cloudflare.tv/api/podcast/O3vVD0Zq https://cloudflare.tv/api/podcast/O3vVD0Zq

bumseltagbaerbi 1y ago

[flagged]

steakscience 1y ago

Game changer

pembrook 1y ago

Love this, assuming they come in as the lowest cost provider. But I'm more interested in seeing how they'll maintain clean sending IPs. I have a feeling they grossly underestimate how difficult this will be. I will not touch this with a 10 foot pole for a few years while they iron out all the kinks.

lexx 1y ago

All web protocols and traffic through one company! Hm, how this could go wrong?

tzahifadida 1y ago

I think this is amazingly great. If they can compete with AWS SES on pricing then, why should I work and pay to 2 services if I already use cloudflare and just use AWS SES for transactional emails. BUT and this is a big one. Most OSS already integrates with SES, so I doubt it will be easy to replace, it may take years, unless.... they can replace them completely as is without adding new codes and apis...

simultsop 1y ago

This could enable anyone serve one self with email. Not that it was not possible, but eleminates tech challenges, reverse dns and configs where you need to spiral down with ISP bureaucracy.

sheerun 1y ago

Very strong move, by one of the few fair comanies that can pull this off

bsoles 1y ago

Cloudflare is an evil company in the making. I would rather stop using email altogether than using their "private" service. No for-profit company should be in the business of blocking IP addresses' access to the Internet. I am sick of their "are you human?" and "we are seeing a lot of traffic from your address" shit already.

twothamendment 1y ago

I'm sick of Cloudflare making me prove I'm not a bot - just because I run Ubuntu. I have a static IP. I visit my bank website regularly, can they not figure out that I'm legit? No, they can not. Can't wait for them to get involved in email... looks like I don't have to!

bumseltagbaerbi 1y ago

[dead]

selinkocalar 1y ago

Email infrastructure is one of those things that seems simple until you actually try to do it.