Cloudflare Email Service: private beta • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#101

Post by drnick1 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 3:59 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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#102

Post by lomase » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #35

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.

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

Every single IT team I know wanted to get rid of the mails servers.

I don't know why. At the same time they don't want to get rid of the bbdd servers, or the app servers.

Maintaining a email service must not be as easy for them.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#103

Post by lxe » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

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

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#104

Post by johtso » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #19

pier25 wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Thanks for recommending mailpace, £7.50/month for 10,000 emails is very reasonable, _and_ they support idempotency! Definitely makes me consider switching to them..

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#105

Post by SirHumphrey » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

observationist wrote: post #52

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…

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”.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#106

Post by wiether » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #88

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

> 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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#107

Post by SoKamil » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #35

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.

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

Well, it’s hard to beat 26 years of expertise.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#108

Post by RandomBacon » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

ry167 wrote: post #48

RandomBacon wrote: post #22

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…

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...

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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#109

Post by pphysch » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

mtrovo wrote: post #89

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..

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

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#110

Post by encom » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #92

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.

Can't believe if you are joking or not. I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?) EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia. Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit…

>cloudflare is not so vital to the internet

Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.