Cloudflare Email Service: private beta • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#191

Post by eastdakota » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

sssilver wrote: post #184

stingraycharles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

> At least they’re not selling ads using your data Sounds great, until a new CEO steps in. Any company is exactly one (or more often zero) CEO away from doing whatever they want (within legal constraints) with their business, in order to fulfill their fiduciary duty (and greed).

I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#192

Post by stackskipton » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #101

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.

I’m the reverse, I can Microsoft 8 bucks not to mess with this? Sign me up!

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#193

Post by everfrustrated » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

cullumsmith wrote: post #166

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've run my own mail for 10 years (postfix/dovecot/rspamd), no issues. Reverse DNS, SPF, and DKIM records need to be in place, but that's a small lift. Well, one time I was unable to send mail to a guy with an ancient @att.com email address from his ISP. I got a nice bounce message back with instructions to contact their sysadmins to get unblocked. To my surprise, they unblocked the IP of my mail server in a matter o…

Private email will have no problems. I also ran my own mail server for personal use and had almost zero problem (and this was on an AWS IP!).

Where people will absolutely have problems is trying to run a marketing campaign through their own IP. You absolutely will (and should) get blocked. This is why these mixer companies exist and why you pay for an intermediary to delivery your mail.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#194

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #187

mrweasel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same day shipping was always the norm here. Order something before 14:00 - 16:00, depending on where the company was on the route for package pickups, and you'd have your package the next day. Amazon has normalized multi-day / weeks shipping, so they've made it worse.

Where is this?

Denmark, there is no close Amazon warehouse, so shipping always suck. Not only is shipping times frequently a week or more, it's also overpriced and items are frequently less expensive from local online stores.

Amazons only advantage is it's massive selection, if you can find what you're looking for.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#195

Post by everfrustrated » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #73

Cloudflare at some point will basically compete with AWS as the entire infra platform for developers. They are slowly building tools one after another. I am really excited to follow how their Containers platform matures as it is still too early.

Yup and why their share price has rocketed. Nobody in the CDN industry is making money - a large player went bankrupt recently. You don't want to look at Fastlys financials and share price Cloud is where the money is.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#196

Post by pikdum » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

thomgo wrote: post #128

pikdum wrote: post #119

As someone not currently using Cloudflare Workers, I'm not sure I want to build a worker and figure out how to interface with it though my existing application just to send email. What happened to SMTP?

REST APIs and SMTP will also be available

Oh cool, somehow missed that. :)

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#197

Post by xp84 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #101

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.

Can you share what your antispam strategy is?

I have arrived at the opinion that what I would do if I moved to selfhost would just be to pay some trivial amount for outbound email via a provider like sendgrid as someone else in these comments has also mentioned. Since I send out maybe a half dozen emails a month I don't think this would be a big deal.

But when I relied on selfhosted email several years ago, I was always inundated with spam, which SpamAssassin was wildly undermatched to handle -- that was one of the main reasons I moved to gmail. So I'm curious what people who are happy self-hosting today are using.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#198

Post by rcakebread » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

eastdakota wrote: post #191

sssilver wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least they’re not selling ads using your data Sounds great, until a new CEO steps in. Any company is exactly one (or more often zero) CEO away from doing whatever they want (within legal constraints) with their business, in order to fulfill their fiduciary duty (and greed).

I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

How do you know?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#199

Post by NoahZuniga » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

> Imagine a user emails your support address. A Worker can receive the email, parse its content, call a third-party API to create a ticket, and then use the Email Sending binding to send an immediate confirmation back to the user with their ticket number. That’s the power of a unified Email Service.

This is/was already possible. You can just reply to an email from an email worker.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#200

Post by vel0city » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

gpi wrote: post #183

motorest wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. I don't think that's it, and I think the explanation is much more simple and straight-forward. Cloudflare established a very successful business model around a straight-forward, very transparent, no-bullshit CDN. Now, they started offering other cloud services build around their CDN. Cloudfla…

Cloudflare is far from a no bullshit CDN. The vendor lock in is real with an aggressive unethcial sales model.

I'm not entirely aware of all their products, but just thinking about a CDN, isn't that in many ways kind of fungible? Is it really that hard to migrate to your big cloud co's CDN (CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN) or the several other large competitors without an immense amount of work?

Please, educate me and tell me what's up.