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!
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.
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.
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.
>// 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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Cloudflare's customers are companies that have to send out, say, reset password emails and verify account emails and other crumbs of the modern web. You want me to build my own infrastructure for that? Personally I can't wait for them to expand to SMS and crush Twilio.
> 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.
Its really not. Everyone can do that (doesn't mean everyone should). I'm running it for millions of emails daily and don't see why I would crappy proprietary service instead.
We are working on an open-source, self-hosted solution [0] to make this easier. When you correctly set up DKIM, SPF, reverse/forward DNS for IPs, it is not much hard to get emails delivered. IPs can still get blacklisted and you need to monitor blacklists and contact them if it happens. Solutions like Postfix are great, but they lack observability. In our solution, we have developed dashboards and health checks to make it easier to find problems with the set up.
We are currently running beta tests (really appreciate it if you can join).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
or if CloudFlare gets conscripted as the new PRISM or NSA censorship
PRISM and the NSA are not involved in censorship but they do like to ingest a lot of data, the more the merrier. Only certain members of CF would know if they are already looped in and would have signed scary things preventing disclosure if that were the case. I just assume everything going through a CDN is monitored since it is a MitM by design. A long while back Akamai got in a lot of trouble for some of their people selling data to a country in the middle east, I forgot which one.
The way the censorious game works in the Ministry of Truth a sub-committee in the DHS sends private messages to former federal employees that work in high positions at tech platforms and advises them what to censor giving the company a way to say they did not officially comply with censorship demands. I will let the Queen of the internet explain [1]. Letting federal employees message people outside of logged government chat platforms is problematic.
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-...
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".
86 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 74.0 ms ] threadSendgrid 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.
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!
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!
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.
What other "root" email services are there out there? Even Google Cloud doesn't provide one...
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.
Its really not. Everyone can do that (doesn't mean everyone should). I'm running it for millions of emails daily and don't see why I would crappy proprietary service instead.
We are currently running beta tests (really appreciate it if you can join).
[0] https://github.com/hyvor/relay
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.
And eventually it'll be so popular other mailservers will stop accepting mail from any except cloudflare/ms/apple/etc.
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.
PRISM and the NSA are not involved in censorship but they do like to ingest a lot of data, the more the merrier. Only certain members of CF would know if they are already looped in and would have signed scary things preventing disclosure if that were the case. I just assume everything going through a CDN is monitored since it is a MitM by design. A long while back Akamai got in a lot of trouble for some of their people selling data to a country in the middle east, I forgot which one.
The way the censorious game works in the Ministry of Truth a sub-committee in the DHS sends private messages to former federal employees that work in high positions at tech platforms and advises them what to censor giving the company a way to say they did not officially comply with censorship demands. I will let the Queen of the internet explain [1]. Letting federal employees message people outside of logged government chat platforms is problematic.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdjQWuJeVqE [video][13 mins]
https://www.ai.moda/en/blog/ses-emails-from-workers
Hopefully it’s helpful next time for you!