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Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#461

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

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, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those.

Who here remembers exactly the same being said by large swaths of the "technologist" community about Google starting the development of Chrome and Chromium?

It's usually good until it isn't. It's still a company that has to make profits, so when the moment comes when they have to chose between "making money" and "provide good service", we all know what choice companies tend to lean towards.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#462

Post by dw64 »

implements wrote: post #445
SahAssar wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true for email or xmpp. Could you please explain?

You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address. Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if…

Having hosted a small mail server for friends for over a decade now, I can only think of this as a myth.

Gmail has specific bulk (!) sender requirements, which to my knowledge don’t include a blanket downranking of residential and „VPS“ IPs (the latter are just datacenter IPs anyways). You need TLS, SPF, DKIM, DNS and reverse DNS entries that align, ideally DMARC and that’s pretty much it.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en#zippy=%2Creq...

At one point I misconfigured a relay as unauthenticated and we got abused by spammers for a day. We got put on all sorts of blacklists within hours and got our IPs cleared self-service immediately after fixing the issue.

If you just send emails completely unauthenticated, yes they will be blocked.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#463

Post by ivell »

sneak wrote: post #457
_heimdall wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you? And no this is not an attempt to in anyway belittle what Nazi German did during WWII. Assuming the employee you are referring to has never been engaged in such acts, though, that feels like a very slippery slope.

Yes. Discrimination in hiring with regard to personal viewpoints (ie adult decisions, not built-in traits) is one of the best ways we have to shape society for the better. As private entities, we have freedom of association - including freedom to shun certain groups. Use it!

Once we start that, we cannot control if it is going to shape the society for the better or worse. Should feminists be prevented from joining a company? How about pro-choice rights activists? And one persons better society would be totally different from the other person's better society.

We should aim to reduce discrimination not encourage it for select causes.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#464

Post by SahAssar »

implements wrote: post #445
SahAssar wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true for email or xmpp. Could you please explain?

You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address. Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if…

In my experience deliverability to gmail is not that hard if you configure stuff correctly. You need a clean IP and domain, rDNS and the usual email stuff like DKIM, DMARC, SPF, but not much else.

Also not sure why you would choose OpenBSD and OpenSMTPD unless OpenBSD is your style. For example I run maddy on linux, which is pretty easy to configure.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#465

Post by bear330 »

aetherspawn wrote: post #363

Now that it’s possible, for anyone looking to start a new FOSS project… I would like if someone could please make a serverless spam catcher service that runs on workers so we can host it in front of self hosted email. Something like: - Blacklists/whitelists and wildcards - Phishing detection - Spam digest/rollup spam into single email every day with buttons to release - Virus scanning of attachments - Replace inbound…

You might want to check out MailTrigger (https://www.mailtrigger.net/) — it's a programmable SMTP server that can even call an LLM before sending emails, so everything you listed is technically doable: blacklists/whitelists, phishing detection, spam rollups, virus scans, link previews, etc. It’s not directly related to the MS email stack, but if you're self-hosting and looking for a flexible, programmable layer in front of your mail server, it could be a good fit. It’s still under development (though already running in production for my own company and a few early adopters), and the pricing page is just a placeholder for now. But the docs are public, and I believe it can cover what you're aiming for.

One thing to note: while the website mainly talks about multi-channel notifications, MailTrigger is actually more like IFTTT or Zapier, but specialized for email — when a message arrives, it can trigger smart, programmable actions. You can turn your existing email system into an IFTTT-style automation engine. It supports JS and WASM for preprocessing and routing, so you could, for example, auto-reply with an LLM-generated joke or handle customer support queries dynamically. The website might not fully reflect this yet, but the docs are more complete and show what’s possible.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#466

Post by littlecranky67 »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #443
littlecranky67 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds expensive. Amazon SES has 1k emails/month included for free (if you use an API to send). When sending via SMTP that quota does not apply, but still 1k Emails just costs 0.1$ (yes, 10 cents). I do not use any other AWS services but SES for my emails because of the pricing, I host everything else on Hetzner.

Yes but AWS SES emails don't get delivered to inboxes

That doesn't seem like even close to the truth, else Amazon SES would have no business. I use it myself in my Webapp to deliver signup verification and haven't gotten a single complaint so far.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#467

Post by jitl »

dpifke wrote: post #202
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…

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.

This seems like a lot of TODOs for something I’d rather just pay a few cents for

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#468

Post by egorfine »

miki123211 wrote: post #436
zenmac wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, recently certain big corp ask me to verify something. I clicked on the link in the E-Mail and it was suck on Cloudflare the click button over and over again. No matter how many times I clicked. Do I need to find another internet access now?

You need to become more like a "normal person." No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP), no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine), no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever, nno PiHole, just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use. HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet…

I am from a specific country.

Could you please suggest me some ways in which I can become more like a normal person? Thanks.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#469

Post by gethly »

mbesto wrote: post #46
gethly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was about to comment on this but you got right to the point. All of this is because people are lazy to build, let alone maintain, their own damn programs and servers.

Your website provides "paywalled hosting and sales platform for digital content creators" Are digital content creators lazy too? Why don't they just host their content on their own damn servers?

I was obviously not talking about end customers but businesses. In my case, digital content creators should just do that - create digital content. They have no reason to tackle hosting, payments, access rules... as that is not their business. It's mine.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#470

Post by gethly »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #61
gethly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was about to comment on this but you got right to the point. All of this is because people are lazy to build, let alone maintain, their own damn programs and servers.

OOF Do you talk to your customers with that mouth? For those who are lazy to click, this guy's business is hosting and maintaining a sales platform for people.

Yes, this guy's business is that. And it is MY business, not my customers'. If you do not understand the nuance of what I am saying, rather keep your thoughts to yourself as you portray yourself in very ignorant light.
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