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Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#201

Post by drnick1 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #138
drnick1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 don't have deliverability issues to the big providers, but that comes down to the age of my domain and my IP in a clean non-residential block. But you won't have reputation issues if your friends and family also run their own server and don't enforce such arbitrary requirements. Running your own servers, not only for email, is the only way to regain control over your computing.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#202

Post by dpifke »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #138
drnick1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#203

Post by r00f »

segmondy wrote: post #161
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.

The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.

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't blame site owners and service that is trying to help them. Blame the fact that 90% of today's Internet traffic is bots

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#204

Post by xp84 »

Question for the Cloudflare people: We use sendgrid today, and create subaccounts through it (entirely with API calls) to allow our customers to add and verify their own domains (with a couple of DNS entries the customer can create). Then we can send out email on their behalf "from" their domains -- with DKIM, SPF, and all that still being happy.

Does the Cloudflare email routing product provide this same capability?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#205

Post by agrippanux »

riedel wrote: post #100
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.

CDNs always existed IMHO. The world before cloudflare was just much more hidden. In general I find their take at the typical cloud business from a network perspective mostly refreshing. However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. IMHO it needs other enterprises entering the competition. Maybe it could be new more software defined mobile…

Oh I remember a time before CDNs and a big part of your startup fundraise was to build out your own setup inside a data center.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#206

Post by dpifke »

truekonrads wrote: post #185
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…

Deliver via sendgrid*, receive directly is probably the only viable path for self hosted systems. Where sendgrid=any major player, could be Mimecast, proofpoint or anyone else who will forward outgoing email.

FWIW, a huge percentage of the spam I get is via Sendgrid, and at some point in the past year or two their abuse reporting mechanisms all turned into black holes, so mail sent via Sendgrid is heavily penalized in my spam rules.

Sending reputation is just as applicable if you're using a third party as if you're hosting it yourself, but much less under your control.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#207

Post by baggachipz »

I wonder what the pricing will be. I would love to have it be where X number are free, then each one additionally will be a small price. I hate having to change tiers based on usage. I would have no problem funding an account and using that to pay for the overage.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#208

Post by betaby »

stingraycharles wrote: post #68
mosura wrote: post #4

Eventually all Internet protocols will be MITMed by cloudflare. Your single point of interception!

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.

> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare

It was better. 'Wget' and 'links' worked with most of the sites.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#209

Post by joshstrange »

I’m interested to see pricing and what the backend dashboards look like for this. I’m currently using PostmarkApp for my transactional emails and they keep bumping the monthly price and my usage is tiny. If I could just pay per email that would be better.

That said, I’m hosted on AWS so maybe I should look into SES as well if I’m going to replace my email sending service.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#210

Post by drnick1 »

xp84 wrote: post #197
drnick1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alw…

My suggestion would be to use a unique alias for each website/company. This way, if you start receiving spam at that address, you know who leaked it, and can simply delete the alias. You should also then publicly name and shame the source of spam.

I also run SpamAssassin on my server, but I don't believe it ever had to do anything.

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