Cloudflare Email Service: private beta • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#281

Post by BinaryIgor » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

observationist wrote: post #139

BinaryIgor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Good points - thank you for a thoughtful answer!

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#282

Post by Gormo » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:36 PM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #86

azemetre wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1930s? 1850s? 1760s?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#283

Post by monkeywork » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #272

r00f wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare. Don…

It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.

That reads more like:

- site owners can have protection as long as it doesn't inconvenience me.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#284

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

dpifke wrote: post #202

matheusmoreira wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have deliverability issues? I entertained the idea of running my own mail servers for a while. After researching the topic it turned out that the internet now runs on an IP reputation system. Major email services like gmail assume that anything sent from unknown IPs is malicious. So it looks like we've gotta be well connected to federate with the other email servers now. A nobody like me can't just start up…

I've run my own mail servers for many decades and have never had any deliverability issues. I've also never used bargain basement cloud VPS services with horrible reputations. The best way to ensure a good reputation is to obtain your own address space from a RIR. Barring that, you need to choose a provider with a decent reputation to delegate the space to you.

> obtain your own address space from a RIR

How does one do that? And what are the costs involved?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#285

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:45 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #282

citizenpaul wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1930s? 1850s? 1760s?

> Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to?

1934 [1].

[1] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep... Humphrey's Executor vs. United States

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#286

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:46 PM UTC

monkeywork wrote: post #283

Dylan16807 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.

That reads more like: - site owners can have protection as long as it doesn't inconvenience me.

Close.

Replace "me" with "legitimate users" and replace "inconvenience" with "very aggressively inconvenience or entirely block".

Then yeah you have it.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#287

Post by python273 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

maz1b wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#288

Post by jasondigitized » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

maz1b wrote: post #26

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.

Resend was a breath of fresh air for me recently.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#289

Post by mrshu » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:53 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #242

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

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

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#290

Post by azemetre » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:54 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #279

azemetre wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To make sure I understand, your position is that anything vitally important to the internet should not be under the control of a plurality of institutions subject to heterogenous incentive structures, but instead should be under the centralized, monopolistic control of a single institution that is perpetually compromised by perverse incentives and ulterior motives, whose mechanisms of accountability are mostly perfor…

My position is that if something becomes critical it should be under democratic constraints in a democratic society and not private enterprises that have no forms of control by the populace.

Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power.

If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies.

So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.