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Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

blog.cloudflare.com

211–220 of 578 posts

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#211
post #6

Been waiting for this for a long time! CloudFlare developer platform is underrated. The ability to use queues, cache (KV), Hyperdrive, and R2 (an S3 equivalent) with one line of code is just brilliant.

I really like CF focus on developers but their R2 is not quite configurable yet as S3. I am looking forward to move away from S3 if R2 can get their bucket policies and permissions as advanced as S3.

Could you accomplish your needs in R2 just using more buckets?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#212
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many of Cloudflare's products are bundled together for reasons.

Trying to unravel all that is an absolute nightmare.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#213
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.

I don't know what kind of internet you used but mine didn't randomly decide to block my access to a website because some quasi monopolist decided I wasn't allowed to use a certain website for intransparent reasons.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#214

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.

I am genuinely curious what protections are in place to ensure that? What is the plan after you are gone?

It looks like you have voting shares with 10x the power of institutional investors, but activist investors aren't dumb either.

My biggest fear of Cloudflare has always been that one day you'll get hit by a bus and someone will figure out that merging Cloudflare with an ad network would create so much more shareholder value. The road to hell is paved with free DDoS mitigation, so to speak.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#215
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, Cloudflare Email Service is not a full-blown email provider like Fastmail, nor is it even comparable to email services like AWS SES or SendGrid. Cloudflare already offered email routing and Cloudflare Email Service just adds the ability to send email via Cloudflare Workers, so there’s a long way to go before Cloudflare could be an option for replacing Fastmail.

What would be the difference if we are talking about transactional emails? Why not comparable to SES?

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#217
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.

> Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something.

Not to comment on whether they're actually a monopoly or not (since idk much about CF's market share, except that it's big), but how does this prove they aren't a monopoly? If anything, it'd work as evidence to prove that they are.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#218
post #4

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

Email is already MITMed by gmail. 90% of my time managing transactional/marketing emails is just keeping gmail from moving my legit customer communications to spam.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#219
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.

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare

It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#220
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, Cloudflare Email Service is not a full-blown email provider like Fastmail, nor is it even comparable to email services like AWS SES or SendGrid. Cloudflare already offered email routing and Cloudflare Email Service just adds the ability to send email via Cloudflare Workers, so there’s a long way to go before Cloudflare could be an option for replacing Fastmail.

What would be the difference if we are talking about transactional emails? Why not comparable to SES?

You know, it might be closer to AWS SES and SendGrid than I thought initially. My first reading of blog post gave me the impression that Cloudflare Email Service was designed for Cloudflare Workers only because that’s what they emphasized upfront. But I missed this piece:

> We’re also making sure Email Service seamlessly fits into your existing applications. If you need to send emails from external services, you can do so using either REST APIs or SMTP.

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