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Cloudflare Email Service

Cloudflare Email Service

jilles

Comments (154)

  • Meekro
    I'm not sure why this announcement has generated so much irritation in the comments-- Cloudflare has been transitioning from "DDoS protection" to "AWS competitor" for many years now, and this is just their alternative to AWS SES.It's an email sender that you can access through an API, or directly through Workers. For those who haven't been keeping up over the years, Workers is their product for running code on Cloudflare's platform directly (an AWS Lambda competitor, more or less) and they've been trying to make it the centerpiece of an ecosystem where you deploy your code to their platform and get access to a variety of tools: databases, storage, streaming, AI, and now email sending. All of this is stuff that AWS has had for years, but some people like Cloudflare more (I certainly do).One thing that surprised me is the price-- Cloudflare's cloud offerings are usually much cheaper, and I've saved plenty of money by migrating from AWS S3 to Cloudflare's R2. This new offering is 3x the AWS price, though. Weird. Anyway, most small companies don't send enough email for it to matter.But getting back to the consensus in the comments here: I'm not sure why people think that they'll be worse about policing spam than AWS SES, Azure Email, etc.
  • nope1000
    It's funny. All the examples they show in the blogpost are just things that were already pretty easy without agents. Sending an email when the CI pipeline passes, when a support request is incoming, when an order is shipped. I think we haven't found a problem for this solution.
  • freefaler
    A classic "the tragedy of the commons" with the SMTP protocol.When the cost of spamming is near 0.00, all open platforms will be abused to the tilt. We have seen the email channel get less and less reliable with our own clients (password recovery, notifications and etc).This might evolve into a couple of oligopolies (Microsoft 365 Outlook, Google Gmail, may be some legacy email providers like Yahoo) and if you want delivery you'd need to pay them, because they'd be the verifiers that you're not a spammer.And these platforms will have a hell of time to fight the spammers that will create millions of email addresses and spam trough them.
  • ghoshbishakh
    Pricing:$0.35 per 1,000 emailsHere are the limits:"Your account may have daily sending limits based on Cloudflare's assessment of your account standing. "Source: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/pri... https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/lim...
  • hardsnow
    I seriously think this great! I’ve been saying that email is the right interface for agents for a while now. It is available anywhere, natively threaded, and works for asynchronous long-form communication. Comes with great clients as well.I’ve been developing last three months by emailing Claude, with email threads mapping to an isolated workspace and claude -p. Works super well, especially when trying to get some coding done between everything else.With right CLAUDE.md and a bit of workflow tooling this extends itself to building other kinds of agents as well. For example, I do my bookkeeping by emailing Claude my statements and receipts, which it then imports into a plain-text accounting system. And we’ve proven this in corporate environment as well, creating agent that can troubleshoot more complex issues by correlating diagnostic logs against product source code.Once the basic “email agent” infrastructure is there, creating new agents becomes super simple.
  • gck1
    Not all email automation is spam and if you want your emails to not end up in spam folder, you pretty much have to go with Google Workspace and pay for essentially entire business suite when you just want to send emails. I needed something like this for my project and it's pretty much Google Workspace or nothing.Cloudflare just filled a huge gap.
  • moribvndvs
    While we’re adding antiquated and shitty ways to interface with your agent, can we add fax support? Maybe direct-to-mail service for postcards and flyers?
  • TechSquidTV
    I feel like a lot of folks down here are focusing too much on the agent part. That's purely marketing. No one who worked on the service, I am sure, was building exclusively for agent usage.This is simply the framing device that all marketing needs to present these days.
  • tornikeo
    Oof. I know of a startup that recently Show HN'd here, the agent mail.to, that is NOT having a good time right now. I don't know what all these new startups having moats thinner than Durex are thinking -- like, what the plan if someone does what you do, faster and cheaper?
  • woodylondon
    I would pay for Cloudflare Workers Paid ($5) in a heartbeat and currently use the free version of cloudflare for all my DNS / Hosting etc. Where it does not meet my needs i have Dokpoly + Digital Ocean. I would use CloudFlare Containers. I currently pay for resend.com for all my email API needs.The problem is that once you're on the paid plan, you're exposed to unlimited risk if your worker goes crazy due to a stupid code bug or if you're hacked. As a solo dev, it's a risk I simply cannot take; I could wake to a bankruptcy bill from Cloudflare. Even as a company, an employee could sign you up and your accounts team would have no idea of the risk.I am using Supabase at the moment, and see they have a hard cap now. and so does Vercel after they had some nightmare stories of large bills in the past.I am not sure why / what CloudFlare think about this - or simply dont care.
  • fny
    I've been very happy with agentmail.to for a while with great success. You get 3K free emails per month with 3 inboxes. Paid tier starts at $0.20 per 1000 emails.Disclaimer: I don't work for agentmail.
  • amazingamazing
    More spam at scale. I wish recipients of email had more control over the conditions to which the email is delivered to them, rather than after the fact curation…
  • pupppet
    After ticking every documented box to get out of AWS SES sandbox mode and being told nope and we can't tell you why, I'm all for this.
  • TimCTRL
    > Everyone already has an email addressThings developers believe about email
  • balupton
    No mention in the announcement that it is restricted to the paid plans. Also no mentioned of it in the paid plan comparison.From the dashboard link:> Enable Email Sending Email Sending is currently only available with the Workers Paid plan. Upgrade your plan to start sending emails.
  • mlhpdx
    I’ll have to take a look at this as a way to move off my homegrown serverless email on AWS. Doesn’t look like it has parity with being able to send email from many subsystems safely (with delay and veto)[1], but is pretty close on the receive side automation[2].[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-origin [2] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery
  • karimf
    Ok I just tried the service since I want to migrate from Resend.Seems like you can only send email via the worker or REST API for now?Can I send via SMTP? I'm using Supabase and it needs the SMTP credentials.I can't find anything on the dashboard or on the docs, even though last year they said it supports SMTP [0][0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/
  • AnonC
    > Everyone already has an email address, which means everyone can already interact with your application or agent. And your agent can interact with anyone.That’s a huge assumption unless you exclude several countries where people have a phone number but not really an email address (or even if they do, they may not know what an email address is) and exclude many very old (say, 70+) people who wouldn’t know what email is or what their email address is.Moving on, I assumed the title meant the launch of a new consumer email service or platform. Reading the announcement, it’s not. That was disappointing to me.
  • btown
    https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/reference/po...Cloudflare is very transparent about their prefixes and reverse DNS, which is generally a good thing for the ecosystem! But it makes it trivial for operators who want to block the entire service, and extremely bad for Cloudflare's deliverability.And while there are many open blacklists which I have no doubt Cloudflare monitors, there are many (including soft spam-classification signals) that are proprietary and difficult/impossible to monitor other than by watching rates of actual customer/prospect replies and engagement.Amazon SQS has similar dynamics, and its reputation is far from stellar.(If the Cloudflare team is reading this, and I'm missing an on-ramp to a company purchasing dedicated IPs with distinct PTR records, I do apologize! I'm not seeing documentation about this, though.)
  • ksajadi
    I think this is going to be a really good service: the service can be used easily with Workers making it super easy to not only send transactional emails but use it for forms embedded in Pages. I am very much looking forward to using this.However, I still think AWS SES is the gold standard of deliverability because of their constant monitoring of your reputation (bounces etc). I always combine it with SendOps (https://sendops.dev/) for easy setup and deep analytics to avoid those issues.
  • VikingCoder
    $0.35 per 1,000 outbound emails. Unlimited inbound emails.How's that compare?
  • edsimpson
    I wish they had developed the open source Inbox into a consumer hosted email service for users. It would have been nice to see more competition with Google and Microsoft.
  • aaronbrethorst
    I am so excited for this. I’ve used Amazon SES begrudgingly for years and have wanted a better UI and easier routing level automation.
  • anon
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  • bob1029
    I'm having a hard time figuring out if I could use this as a replacement for something like AWS WorkMail or E365. The "Agentic" inbox looks really nice, but is this intended for humans to use? I am really confused due to the marketing hype.
  • pradn
    How much do existing services trust new email service providers? It would seem to be an uphill battle for Cloudflare to start a new service. It's easy to automate from the start, meaning it's easier to send spam. I suppose reputation is not simply based on the domain the email comes from?
  • dgb23
    It's certainly interesting that they provide an email service now. In their documentation/blog recommendations they switched their recommended approach twice or three times already.If they establish a solid email solution I will likely use that for some of the projects I'm hosting there.
  • _pdp_
    Good! However, ...Sending and receiving is in my mind the easy part. The hardest part is to make this work with actual AI agents. This is the same problem as with sub-agent communication because you need to implement all kinds of additional fictionality to ensure the agent is not just responding for no good reason, go into loops, etc.My $0.02 from experience.
  • sltr
    > Email is the most accessible interface in the worldEmail is one of the most gatekept interfaces in the world.
  • cdrnsf
    If I get one email from your agent, I'm torching your entire domain.
  • john_strinlai
    >Everyone already has an email address, which means everyone can already interact with your application or agent. And your agent can interact with anyone.please no.>Sending email that actually reaches inboxes usually means wrestling with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. When you add your domain to Email Service, we configure all of it automatically. Your emails are authenticated and delivered, not flagged as spam.this is going to be an absolute nightmare for spam. i cant exactly block all of cloudflare...it would be nice if anyone at cloudflare could write about how they plan to proactively reduce abuse of this feature, how they will respond to spam reports, what the punishment for abuse will be, etc.
  • TimLeland
    How easy is it to switch from other email providers?
  • potato-peeler
    I can use this to set up my own custom mail service, like an alternative to gmail? Or at the very least, my own personal mail provider?
  • ttul
  • ryangst_1
    $0.35 per 1,000 emails it's fair pricing.Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.
  • bjord
    finally, more spam!
  • yalogin
    Isn’t email already scriptable? What does cf provide that is different? I clicked on it assuming they are launching their own email service.
  • daft_pink
    I’m really just curious how they guard against prompt injection. Otherwise this seems awesome.
  • cbg0
    How far off are we from Cloudflare releasing a Gmail competitor?
  • opengrass
    No thanks I'll keep my Mailgun. After 2.5M it's half the SES bill.
  • schainks
    Sendgrid is such an enshittified product, I am grateful this now exists and integrates directly with tools I have on cloudflare already.
  • freitzzz
    If we're letting agents send e-mail, what's the point of reading e-mail? Surely I can have an agent to reply to e-mail that other agent has sent. Do we really want to create dead internet?
  • AtNightWeCode
    I never got email routing to work. I doubt this will work in the general case.
  • csomar
    This is a very long post just to say they're now running an SMTP server. I've been sending and receiving emails from Workers for two years; though for sending, you still need an external SMTP server like SES or Postmark.Don't get me wrong, sending (and delivering) emails is genuinely hard. But we'll only know how good Cloudflare is at it after a couple years of real-world experience.
  • Hamuko
    How awful is the reputation on those IP addresses going to be?
  • qJaskkT
    Did anyone ask the poor people who unknowingly send mail to someone who feeds it to an AI surveillance company?It would be interesting to send GDPR requests and have Cloudflare figure out all of the parties who got or use your mail.
  • cdrnsf
    Slop spam? Slam?
  • johtso
    Another email sending service without support for idempotency?
  • SleepyQuant
    [flagged]
  • baal80spam
    Ugh, who asked for this?