Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare Email Service

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 217 posts

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#41

Post by Meekro »

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 Cloudflare's platform directly (an AWS Lambda competitor, more or less) and they've been trying to make it the centerpiece of an ecosystem where you deploy your code to their platform and get access to a variety of tools: databases, storage, streaming, AI, and now email sending. All of this is stuff that AWS has had for years, but some people like Cloudflare more (I certainly do).

One thing that surprised me is the price-- Cloudflare's cloud offerings are usually much cheaper, and I've saved plenty of money by migrating from AWS S3 to Cloudflare's R2. This new offering is 3x the AWS price, though. Weird. Anyway, most small companies don't send enough email for it to matter.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#42

Post by TechSquidTV »

I feel like a lot of folks down here are focusing too much on the agent part. That's purely marketing. No one who worked on the service, I am sure, was building exclusively for agent usage.

This is simply the framing device that all marketing needs to present these days.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#43

Post by dawnerd »

yalogin wrote: post #40

Isn’t email already scriptable? What does cf provide that is different? I clicked on it assuming they are launching their own email service.

It really is showing how dumb this whole bubble is when you can launch the same service that’s been around for decades but slap ai and agent on it.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#44

Post by hardsnow »

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 coding done between everything else.

With right CLAUDE.md and a bit of workflow tooling this extends itself to building other kinds of agents as well. For example, I do my bookkeeping by emailing Claude my statements and receipts, which it then imports into a plain-text accounting system. And we’ve proven this in corporate environment as well, creating agent that can troubleshoot more complex issues by correlating diagnostic logs against product source code.

Once the basic “email agent” infrastructure is there, creating new agents becomes super simple.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#45

Post by arkaoss »

TimCTRL wrote: post #16

> Everyone already has an email address Things developers believe about email

There is not much developers UNDERSTAND about email, let alone believe... There's soo much to read into this product.. and it boils down to JASS ( just another spam source) .

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#47

Post by nutjob2 »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #38
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've gotten my email routed to spam even though it never left the Google cloud. They don't say, "Gosh, this is coming from inside the house. Therefore it's trustworthy." Nope. The push legit mail from other Google hosted domains into spam without a second thought.

I've had emails from Google end up in spam and I'm using Google Workspace, it's driven by what people flag as spam, not domain trust.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#48

Post by bakugo »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #42

I feel like a lot of folks down here are focusing too much on the agent part. That's purely marketing. No one who worked on the service, I am sure, was building exclusively for agent usage. This is simply the framing device that all marketing needs to present these days.

Of course it's just marketing, but that doesn't mean it's above criticism, especially when it's shoved so hard down our throats.

"Please stop talking about the thing we can't stop talking about"

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#49

Post by embedding-shape »

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…

> 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.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#50

Post by verdverm »

moribvndvs wrote: post #4

While we’re adding antiquated and shitty ways to interface with your agent, can we add fax support? Maybe direct-to-mail service for postcards and flyers?

This has been possible for many years, before agents were a thing. They will open the mail and scan the contents into a pdf for you, requires filing a form with the post office. It gets expensive because they nickel and dime you where they can. There are many more services should you wish to send snail mail.

https://www.virtualpostmail.com/

Post reply on HN