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Cloudflare Email Service

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#91

Post by written-beyond »

nope1000 wrote: post #29

It's funny. All the examples they show in the blogpost are just things that were already pretty easy without agents. Sending an email when the CI pipeline passes, when a support request is incoming, when an order is shipped. I think we haven't found a problem for this solution.

The problem is how bullshit transactional emails are when you're outside of AWS. If you're not expecting to use 10,000 emails a month but would like the option to go over the free tier without committing to 10,000 more. Just let me pay per use FFS.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#93

Post by Meekro »

embedding-shape wrote: post #73
thomas_gauvin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog author chiming in here: We have reserved IPs for Email Service and will be protecting the reputation and fighting spam from originating on Email Service. If we did not do so, our IPs would get flagged and then emails end up in spam or not delivered. That defeats the purpose of having a transactional Email Service. We're well aware of this.

Will you also do this for other spammers using Cloudflare infrastructure, or just specifically for this email product? > For years, Spamhaus has observed abusive activity facilitated by Cloudflare’s various services. Cybercriminals have been exploiting these legitimate services to mask activities and enhance their malicious operations, a tactic referred to as living off trusted services (LOTS) [2]. > With 1201 unreso…

I would note that Cloudflare has been doing better-- the SBL listings page mentioned in that article[1] shows only 47 active complaints, down from 1201 when the article was written 2 years ago. Many of those complaints are stale, too: I spot-checked a few (referencing the domains fireplacecoffee.com and expansionus.com) and the domains are expired and not being hosted by anyone.

[1] https://check.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/cloudflare.com/

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#94

Post by gardnr »

Meekro wrote: post #65
password4321 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is spending years of goodwill earned through technical skill, trending towards AI enshittification starting with their blog posts and vibe coded features/products.

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.

It's like the author handed the copy to the editor who then added a new broken sentence after each original sentence that somehow jams "agents" in there.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#95

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Meekro wrote: post #57
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every SaaS (Spam as a Service) API ends up arguing its minority of legitimate users are a justified excuse for the majority of nuisance traffic. Most cloud IP blocks already have very poor reputations, and or already on Spamhaus blacklists. People have a right to choose to be upset. =3

My experience has been the opposite of what you're saying: AWS SES (one of AWS's flagship products, and probably the biggest email sender in the world) is a pretty responsible anti-spam citizen. Spamhaus even wrote this article[1] praising SES's anti-spam efforts. From the article: "Amazon SES has a long-standing relationship with Spamhaus, working closely to prevent suspicious IPs and domains from impacting their ne…

Whatever IP people temporarily host on a cloud incurs the prior users reputation.

Again, using legitimate traffic to shim network spam is a common counterargument against black listing.

Of the approximate 274000 banned hosts I stare at... many nuisances are from Amazon, Azure, digital ocean, and Hetzner. I am sure Maildrill or Mailchimp does have legitimate use cases, but generally the majority of the traffic suggests otherwise. I am certainly biased in this opinion. =3

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#96

Post by wang_li »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #70
embedding-shape wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Blog author chiming in here: We have reserved IPs for Email Service and will be protecting the reputation and fighting spam from originating on Email Service. If we did not do so, our IPs would get flagged and then emails end up in spam or not delivered. That defeats the purpose of having a transactional Email Service. We're well aware of this.

I think you should put your money where your mouth is. For each spam message sent to a recipient server, you send $1000 to the recipient.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#97

Post by Bender »

thomas_gauvin wrote: post #70
embedding-shape wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Blog author chiming in here: We have reserved IPs for Email Service and will be protecting the reputation and fighting spam from originating on Email Service. If we did not do so, our IPs would get flagged and then emails end up in spam or not delivered. That defeats the purpose of having a transactional Email Service. We're well aware of this.

As someone that has managed very large outbound transactional email environments, email campaign platforms and some corporate email I just wanted to wish Cloudflare the best of luck on this endeavor. This is an entirely different animal from anything related to a CDN. Stay vigilant and don't let the cute and fuzzy bunnies ruin it for everyone else. They are evil and mischievous and will do whatever they technically can do.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#98

Post by gpi »

password4321 wrote: post #58
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 is spending years of goodwill earned through technical skill, trending towards AI enshittification starting with their blog posts and vibe coded features/products.

Unfortunate situation. Also, what is cloudflare exactly? They seemed to have diversified a tad much.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service

#100

Post by bridgetburch »

tornikeo wrote: post #6

Oof. I know of a startup that recently Show HN'd here, the agent mail.to, that is NOT having a good time right now. I don't know what all these new startups having moats thinner than Durex are thinking -- like, what the plan if someone does what you do, faster and cheaper?

I'm building something similar (Dead Simple Email - same category, different pricing structure). The moat criticism is fair and worth being honest about. The defensible part isn't the feature set, it's infrastructure and price. We run our own mail servers rather than reselling SES, which gives us direct control over deliverability and costs. That's what lets us charge $29/mo for 100 inboxes where AgentMail is at $200. Whether that's a real moat or just a head start is a legitimate question. Email deliverability is genuinely hard to get right at scale, but I can't say with confidence they won't eventually just absorb this. Building fast and staying cheap is the only real answer I have to that.
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