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Cloudflare Email Service

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#81

Post by Meekro »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #76
Meekro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also kind of rolled my eyes at the blog post and its obsessive focus on "agents" -- definitely feels like a solution looking for a problem. But the email-sending product being promoted is probably ok, right? They just happened to write a lot of words observing that ChatGPT can, in fact, call sendmail() through their platform (if you give it access) -- a fact that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Blog author chiming in: Our initial blog covered most of Email Service's API and what you can expect from it in terms of deliverability, DNS records setup, etc. https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/ Email Service can definitely be used as a transactional email API, and it has everything you would expect like SDKs, binding, observability and more coming on the way The agent angle in this post reflects what we're…

Thanks for the clarification! Sounds like some developers, including your beta users, are experimenting with new ideas (which includes plugging agents into different workflows to see what happens), while old farts like myself bemoan AI getting plugged into everything and every app sprouting "Ask AI" buttons that they never asked for or wanted.

I can definitely understand some of the ire-- people are probably imagining how they'll try to contact Verizon and will get back a totally unhelpful email from ChatGPT when all they wanted was to talk to a real human for 5 minutes. Your blog post about hooking up agents to email probably speaks to that fear.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#82

Post by karimf »

Ok I just tried the service since I want to migrate from Resend.

Seems like you can only send email via the worker or REST API for now?

Can I send via SMTP? I'm using Supabase and it needs the SMTP credentials.

I can't find anything on the dashboard or on the docs, even though last year they said it supports SMTP [0]

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#83

Post by dbbk »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #76
Meekro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also kind of rolled my eyes at the blog post and its obsessive focus on "agents" -- definitely feels like a solution looking for a problem. But the email-sending product being promoted is probably ok, right? They just happened to write a lot of words observing that ChatGPT can, in fact, call sendmail() through their platform (if you give it access) -- a fact that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Blog author chiming in: Our initial blog covered most of Email Service's API and what you can expect from it in terms of deliverability, DNS records setup, etc. https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/ Email Service can definitely be used as a transactional email API, and it has everything you would expect like SDKs, binding, observability and more coming on the way The agent angle in this post reflects what we're…

It's just email man you do not need to throw an AI buzzword in front of everything

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#84

Post by ksajadi »

I think this is going to be a really good service: the service can be used easily with Workers making it super easy to not only send transactional emails but use it for forms embedded in Pages. I am very much looking forward to using this.

However, I still think AWS SES is the gold standard of deliverability because of their constant monitoring of your reputation (bounces etc). I always combine it with SendOps (https://sendops.dev/) for easy setup and deep analytics to avoid those issues.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#85

Post by dgb23 »

It's certainly interesting that they provide an email service now. In their documentation/blog recommendations they switched their recommended approach twice or three times already.

If they establish a solid email solution I will likely use that for some of the projects I'm hosting there.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#86

Post by Meekro »

fernandotakai wrote: post #80
thomas_gauvin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog author chiming in: Our initial blog covered most of Email Service's API and what you can expect from it in terms of deliverability, DNS records setup, etc. https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/ Email Service can definitely be used as a transactional email API, and it has everything you would expect like SDKs, binding, observability and more coming on the way The agent angle in this post reflects what we're…

>The agent angle in this post reflects what we're actually seeing from developers during our private beta. legit question: did you invite anyone that isn't doing agentic whatever during your beta?

Thomas can probably speak to this better, but as someone who has participated in other Cloudflare betas: there's usually a button or a form and you can request access.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#87

Post by Onavo »

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…

> 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.

For certain types of marketing and transactional emails, it's cheaper I think. AWS SES pricing doesn't include attachments. If you assume a maxed out 25MB email attachment body, I think the price comes out to be mostly similar, amortized at least.

But if you are sending basic text/mostly text transactional emails for stuff like password resets, then SES comes out ahead for sure.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#89

Post by pradn »

How much do existing services trust new email service providers? It would seem to be an uphill battle for Cloudflare to start a new service. It's easy to automate from the start, meaning it's easier to send spam. I suppose reputation is not simply based on the domain the email comes from?
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