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Cloudflare Email Service

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#161

Post by Dylan16807 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #156
pocksuppet wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> problem is that the Spanish government doesn't want to bother doing things the lawful way because that takes too long In Spain, what they are doing, is the "lawful way", it's literally happening via the courts and judges. Do you think ISPs are blocking Cloudflare specifically just for fun, out of their own accord? > Actual illegal sports streams are not impacted by Cloudflare being down, and Cloudflare is not the o…

The specific blocks don't go through courts and judges.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#162

Post by strbean »

CWwdcdk7h wrote: post #25
tornikeo wrote: post #6

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?

> We raised $6M in Seed Funding Well that part was impressive. It looks like they focused on receiving emails, that is probably even worse, as I expect OpenAI/Anthropic to add such ability directly to agents, if it really is useful.

> It looks like they focused on receiving emails

That's wild. $6M for an MCP server for SMTP?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#163

Post by pier25 »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #160
pier25 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty good pricing. Currently using ZeptoMail ($2.5 per 10,000 emails) but if this service by Cloudflare proves reliable once it reaches GA I'd be happy to switch.

Why not use SES?

I just avoid AWS as much as I can.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#164

Post by ttul »

pbronez wrote: post #112
ttul wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

What structural changes could we make to improve the situation?

That is such a great question and there is no easy answer. There have been enormous efforts to do better for at least the last 20 years. An entire organization, M3AAWG, was founded for that reason and it meets three times a year, bringing together all the people that matter for making the situation better. It's a great organization and the people are all really smart and awesome. The IETF is no slouch either, coming up with excellent new standards and improving existing ones, such as the recent update to DKIM.

That's about as good of an answer as I can provide: keep sending smart people to the conferences!

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#166

Post by creatonez »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #70
embedding-shape wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Cloudflare is (in)famous for not acting against spammers, fraud, piracy and other less savory groups that are hosting their stuff at/behind Cloudflare, so reasonably, people who've been affected by that are now afraid the same thing will happen with email.

Blog author chiming in here: We have reserved IPs for Email Service and will be protecting the reputation and fighting spam from originating on Email Service. If we did not do so, our IPs would get flagged and then emails end up in spam or not delivered. That defeats the purpose of having a transactional Email Service. We're well aware of this.

Agent-produced emails are by definition spam. Everyone should be reacting to this news by immediately blocking your service.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#167

Post by magguzu »

navigate8310 wrote: post #104
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.

This isn't unique to Cloudflare. Microsoft email spam filter absolutely sucks. I hit it a lot too from my small provider.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#168

Post by shauntest12321 »

hardsnow wrote: post #44

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 c…

Awesome, checkout https://ainative.email

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#169

Post by ttul »

jgalt212 wrote: post #131
pbronez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What structural changes could we make to improve the situation?

Hashcash, or BTC.

I always loved the hashcash concept and actually raised our original funding because of it (our Microsoft angels loved the idea of making spamming more expensive, and our Series A concept was tar-pitting to dissuade botnets). In the context of email sending services, we have a modern version of hashcash that we might at some point turn to. If someone can figure out how to tokenize sending at scale, then senders could pay recipients to open their emails by attaching a "tip" to each message.

If even a small fraction of legitimate email recipients altered their mail client settings to route "tipped" messages to their inbox, that would probably suffice to get senders to participate in the scheme. Senders are starved for high quality engagement data. Meanwhile, anything we can do to make spam less likely - on a relative scale - to reach the inbox in comparison to "legitimate" traffic, is a win.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#170

Post by ttul »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #70
embedding-shape wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Cloudflare is (in)famous for not acting against spammers, fraud, piracy and other less savory groups that are hosting their stuff at/behind Cloudflare, so reasonably, people who've been affected by that are now afraid the same thing will happen with email.

Blog author chiming in here: We have reserved IPs for Email Service and will be protecting the reputation and fighting spam from originating on Email Service. If we did not do so, our IPs would get flagged and then emails end up in spam or not delivered. That defeats the purpose of having a transactional Email Service. We're well aware of this.

If you take the approach of policing individual sender accounts with a strict anti-abuse policy, you have a chance of succeeding. I'm sure you have already discovered that the moment you allow anyone to sign up for an email sending account, the worst of the worst actors immediately take up the opportunity to do so! Cloudflare has a massive amount of data about web traffic and I would hope that this data can be recycled into effective threat detection and control. No doubt you already know this and have people working on it. Good luck!
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