Cloudflare Email Service: private beta (blog.cloudflare.com)

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.

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.

And then they'll offer to 'protect' you from AI scrapers for a fee and then bulk negotiate against Google, etc for another fee.

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.

It's not really a big deal to MITM email anyway.

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.

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..

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.

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.

The new Room 641A

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-...

I approve of this message.

[dead]

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.

That's exactly why I'm excited. I could really use this.

I run my own email server and you couldn't pay me to use a commercial provider like Google instead. The privacy benefits are huge and there is no one to restrict my storage or change my "terms and conditions" overnight.

The days of people running their own servers are gone because of the shortsightedness and laziness of IT managers. They though the "cloud" would be easier and cheaper, and they are now trapped.

It's really not that hard to run a mailserver with https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

The problem is that Gmail will bounce any emails from DigitalOcean IP, even if you sit on this IP for years (so no recent spam), even if replying to someone, even if you registered as 'Postmaster' on Google.

So if you want to selfhost, you'll first need to find an IP that's not blocked to begin with.

I've run my own mail for 10 years (postfix/dovecot/rspamd), no issues. Reverse DNS, SPF, and DKIM records need to be in place, but that's a small lift.

Well, one time I was unable to send mail to a guy with an ancient @att.com email address from his ISP. I got a nice bounce message back with instructions to contact their sysadmins to get unblocked.

To my surprise, they unblocked the IP of my mail server in a matter of hours.

This is a myth though (with some truth to it in certain cases). I've run my own mail infrastructure since 1999, no issues.

> I like their products

I do, too. What I don't like is that they became too large and now are effectively in position to gatekeep the whole internet.

Resend was a breath of fresh air for me recently.

There is a sweet spot between Gmail and self-hosting. I use Runbox and generally separate contexts, with CF being an exception as I use CF pages for static blog websites, some of their core services, AND as a registrar. For the latter, the default setting is porkbun. The reason for this is not CF's mandatory in-house DNS servers, but the simple fact that they do not register .de domains.

> The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone

This is very much a myth. There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster (professionally, I'm responsible for both at my org, so I can make this comparison with some authority).

Honestly `apt install postfix dovecot` gets you 90% of the way there. Getting spambinned isn't a problem in my experience, as long as you're doing SPF and DKIM and not using an often-abused IP range (yes, this means you can't use AWS). The MTA/MDA software is rock-solid and will happily run for years on end without human intervention. There really isn't anything to maintain on a regular basis apart from patches/updates every few months.

Zeptomail by zoho has been reliable for me and extremely reasonably priced: https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail/

Even with those pricing structures, 95%[1] of the spam I get comes from sendgrid. To their credit, their abuse@ address is good at handling the reports and they reply with a followup that the report was received and able to be acted upon[2].

The volume of spam (for me) doesn't seem to be decreasing from them, so there's a lot of moles to whack.

[1] Just a guess from looking at the last weeks [2] I know it's automated, but often there's 2 that come with the 2nd one stating it's acted upon, so i'm hopeful.

Re: Sendgrid killing their free tier - I used them for the contact form on my personal website, and after they ended the free tier I was able to move to Resend (who has a similar free tier) without too much work. Pretty happy with it so far.

Try https://mailpace.com

The lowest plan $40/year for 1k emails/month isn’t on the Pricing page, but you can select it when signing up.

smtp2go.com offers a free tier with 1,000 emails/month. I’ve been using it for a few small services I run and haven’t had any issues so far.

smtp2go will let you have 200 a day or 1000 a month for free.

> 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.

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

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

It's because every communication protocol since has been a walled-garden with a rent-seeker attached. This is why open, federated protocols are so critically important.

I hear your pain. However I think if you really look at it email is a good thing. Its brokenness is a highly desired feature. It is the last generally accepted tech bastion that keeps us from becoming some sort of always on the job star trek borg style creatures that cannot have plausible deniability that the computer failed.

Oh i didn't get that email.

Oh spam filter.

Oh so backlogged on email.

Spam push messages don’t need to be a thing. Ever.

This is the fate of most open protocols. It becomes too hard to migrate to a new spec due to the increasing difficulty of coordination and then the protocol gets stuck in time.

China was able to pull that one off, pretty much no one uses email there.

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.

About their developer platform: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-developer-platform-ke...

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.

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.

I use it with a couple of addresses. No issues so far.

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...

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.

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.

They do, it’s call “pages”

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

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.

> 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.

That's nothing. One of the recent CloudFlare outages was because they hosted some essential stuff at Google cloud and that had an outage

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.

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.

This is a SendGrid alternative (transactional emails, potentially with a nice API).

A lot of folks find SES or even just the broader AWS experience unpleasant.

I like this version of AWS

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?

REST APIs and SMTP will also be available

Sure, I wouldn’t want the Linux foundation or other pieces of critical FOSS infrastructure to be routed via Cloudflair. But if I am setting up a web shop for somebody they usually care much more about someone at least pretending to be doing something about a ddos they got hit with that the decentralised internet.

To quote Raytheon “Morals are cool but 90k/year sounds a lot cooler”.

In principle I agree, but in practice - what the better ways of doing things, as of now?

Agreed.

One thing I've grown concerned about, after watching the Twitter migration fizzle out, is we can imitate the old internet on a small scale, but on a large scale it just doesn't work. For Twitter specifically, the outcome was even worse, many users just migrated to other more centralized services or existing monopolies (like Instagram.)

Users are too used to being able to instantly stream 4k HDR 60fps. They are too used to limited amounts of spam. They are too used to having most non-agreeable content filtered. All of this stuff that big tech delivered now is replicate-able at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. The only business model that can pay for that is owning a giant ad platform.

Thinking about all of the issues the EU has had enforcing things like GDPR, which big tech companies largely haven't followed for years or straight up lied to their customers about, along with a possible failure of the DMA now due to tariffs.. and yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the US utterly failed to ban or control Tiktok. Endless announcements of upcoming deals that were either lies (Oracle protecting American's data) or postponements.

Meanwhile, all of the spam, hacking, bots, and DDoS attacks persist and grow, along with layer upon layer of (probably intentionally) poorly written and often conflicting legislation across multiple jurisdictions have truly made it impossible for the internet as it was designed and meant to exist to continue. (Sure you can just set up a basic web forum like you could do 20 years ago, not use Cloudflare, not host it at a major datacenter, and ignore all of the GDPR and age verification laws, but good luck. Hell, it doesn't even sound like it's really legal to run a Mastodon server anymore.)

One small hope is that if internet companies follow any pattern we've seen in other industries, when the growth ends, the managers will switch to tearing the conglomerates apart in to pieces and selling them off. One day CloudFlare might be split in to 30 pieces, along with Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. But it could be a while.

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.

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)

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.

Postmark is pretty good as well :)

Mailjet, mailgun, sparkpost and a bunch of others.

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.

Where are you getting this from?

Is Fastmail in any way similar to what is being described here? Fastmail looks like a replacement for Gmail or maybe Gsuite.

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.