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Cloudflare Email Service

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#101

Post by 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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#102

Post by Meekro »

SleepyQuant wrote: post #88

[flagged]

You mentioned a 12-agent setup with IMAP that you might consider migrating into this platform. Could you tell me more about the overall goal of the project? I'm curious because this whole "email+agent" thing that the article talks about strikes me as kind of strange, and I'm curious what the non-spam use cases are.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#103

Post by arpinum »

Meekro wrote: post #41

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 Cloud…

The pricing is disappointing. I'm surprised Cloudflare has not tried to compete on price against AWS lately after a good start with R2. Queues, database storage, database writes, worker invocation all more expensive than the AWS offering.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#104

Post by navigate8310 »

Meekro wrote: post #41

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 Cloud…

I've used their email relay services to forward it to my Microsoft account, every forward is rejected by Microsoft due to spam generated by Cloudflare. So I don't have much faith at least in their email services.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#105

Post by NicoJuicy »

woodylondon wrote: post #101

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 stupi…

They are working on it

Source : post on x from an employee

Side note: the bills from cloudflare are much lower than the ones from AWS/Vercel when there's a mistake. The most I saw passing by was 150€, with Vercel and AWS > 10 k.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#106

Post by freefaler »

Youden wrote: post #37
freefaler wrote: post #23

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…

I don't think the protocol is necessarily the problem. For example we don't say the HTTP protocol is the problem when spammers abuse website comment forms or forums, we say it's the server on the other side. I think the answer is somewhat the same as where we've gone with many HTTP servers: proof of work. Just like Captcha and more recently Cloudflare turnstile required you complete a task before you'd be able to acc…

The legacy compatibility of the protocol has brought all the hacks on top of it for identity verification like SPF, DMARC, DKIM ...

Even with those, the amount of farmed accounts from a reputable platforms is still high, and it will go higher with the cheap AI targeting that will make the texts much more well crafted and spam filters much more aggressive.

My other conjecture is that the big mail providers would have enough data to catch the spammers based on a number of signals.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#107

Post by ttul »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
ttul wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to email delivery, you can't ignore spam. It's the bane of existence of every email sending service and the number one business challenge in that segment. After all, orchestrating delivery over SMTP is not rocket science. But getting that email to not be rejected totally IS rocket science and it's simultaneously an art form known only to a handful of email nerds working at the core of the big email send…

Ok, but what about as a CDN/website-proxy/WAF? I know we don't have the same automated reputation-propagation as with email, but same thing supposedly happens there, where eventually you get turned off if you don't act on lawful requests, which is exactly why Cloudflare is unavailable in Spain during La Liga matches, because Cloudflare don't take piracy streams down. In theory, Cloudflare should take those down, when…

I run an email sending service at scale (billions of messages per month, tens of millions of end users, thousands of customers). Most of our software development and operational effort revolves around abuse mitigation. That has been the case for 15 years. It's a cat-and-mouse game with two different mice: the senders, who are constantly trying to figure out how to get you to deliver their garbage; and the receivers, who are constantly trying to figure out how to block it. We're stuck in the middle.

It's hard to appreciate how difficult this battle is when running at scale.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#108

Post by 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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#109

Post by pocksuppet »

sixhobbits wrote: post #51
Meekro wrote: post #41

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 Cloud…

I'm not sure if it's a correct impression but my impression is still that AWS is the "devil you know" and Cloudflare is less predictable with more individual decision making from high ups. I guess they got that reputation years ago when the founders (?) got into public spats about what they would and wouldn't host. AWS is more lawyers and committees and seems more anonymous, so people don't necessarily like it more b…

Cloudflare will predictably shut down your account until you pay $150k. They will not transfer out any of your domains or files - they will be inaccessible until you pay $150k.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#110

Post by pocksuppet »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
ttul wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to email delivery, you can't ignore spam. It's the bane of existence of every email sending service and the number one business challenge in that segment. After all, orchestrating delivery over SMTP is not rocket science. But getting that email to not be rejected totally IS rocket science and it's simultaneously an art form known only to a handful of email nerds working at the core of the big email send…

Ok, but what about as a CDN/website-proxy/WAF? I know we don't have the same automated reputation-propagation as with email, but same thing supposedly happens there, where eventually you get turned off if you don't act on lawful requests, which is exactly why Cloudflare is unavailable in Spain during La Liga matches, because Cloudflare don't take piracy streams down. In theory, Cloudflare should take those down, when…

Cloudflare acts on lawful requests during LaLiga matches. The problem is that the Spanish government doesn't want to bother doing things the lawful way because that takes too long. They want piracy to magically disappear and they'll randomly shut down more parts of the internet until it does. Actual illegal sports streams are not impacted by Cloudflare being down, and Cloudflare is not the only impacted network.
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