Discussion

baal80spam: Ugh, who asked for this?

tornikeo: 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?

ghoshbishakh: Pricing:$0.35 per 1,000 emailsHere are the limits:"Your account may have daily sending limits based on Cloudflare's assessment of your account standing. "Source: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/pri... https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/lim...

Kye: Classic "is this a feature or a product?" problem. You're going to have a bad time if you spend all your effort on a feature and nothing to set it apart.

VikingCoder: $0.35 per 1,000 outbound emails. Unlimited inbound emails.How's that compare?

sammy2255: Where did you find the pricing page? I can't find it anywhere

tom1337: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/pri...

sammy2255: Thanks, hiding the pricing under a submenu called "Platform" is an .. interesting design choice

ryangst_1: $0.35 per 1,000 emails it's fair pricing.Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.

nope1000: 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.

qJaskkT: Did anyone ask the poor people who unknowingly send mail to someone who feeds it to an AI surveillance company?It would be interesting to send GDPR requests and have Cloudflare figure out all of the parties who got or use your mail.

skc: Yep, and I'm both a Cloudflare and Resend customer.I like Resend, a lot, but this is probably something I can't pass up, especially if it does what it says on the tin

freefaler: 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 delivery you'd need to pay them, because they'd be the verifiers that you're not a spammer.And these platforms will have a hell of time to fight the spammers that will create millions of email addresses and spam trough them.

xhkkffbf: 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.

Youden: I don't think the protocol is necessarily the problem. For example we don't say the HTTP protocol is the problem when spammers abuse website comment forms or forums, we say it's the server on the other side.I think the answer is somewhat the same as where we've gone with many HTTP servers: proof of work. Just like Captcha and more recently Cloudflare turnstile required you complete a task before you'd be able to access as website, senders should be required to complete a task before you'll accept their email.It can even be a sliding scale: the higher you want the chances of the recipient seeing it to be, the more work you need to do.However this also break emails considered "legitimate" by businesses, like marketing newsletters and other nonsense, which is why it'll likely never happen.

moribvndvs: 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?

doublerabbit: Can we go minidisc if we're going for obsolete tech?

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.

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

dawnerd: 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.

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.

mlhpdx: I’ll have to take a look at this as a way to move off my homegrown serverless email on AWS. Doesn’t look like it has parity with being able to send email from many subsystems safely (with delay and veto)[1], but is pretty close on the receive side automation[2].[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-origin [2] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery

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.

sixhobbits: I'm not sure if it's a correct impression but my impression is still that AWS is the "devil you know" and Cloudflare is less predictable with more individual decision making from high ups.I guess they got that reputation years ago when the founders (?) got into public spats about what they would and wouldn't host. AWS is more lawyers and committees and seems more anonymous, so people don't necessarily like it more but they do trust it to be what it looks like more.Probably just a function of time and size.

verdverm: 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/

bdangubic: Resend will change the pricing - guaranteed. Not sure how soon but I'd expect very soon.

STRiDEX: I guess if they're big enough they should be working on moving off of amazon SES for emails and warming up ip addresses? Otherwise they need to keep a markup on top of amazon.Edit: didn't realize people were paying resend $20. AWS already exists at a low price and people pick them anyway, i'm sure they're fine.

pupppet: I'm betting a non-small chunk of these are users AWS wouldn't let out of sandbox mode.

embedding-shape: > 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.

ttul: When it comes to email delivery, you can't ignore spam. It's the bane of existence of every email sending service and the number one business challenge in that segment. After all, orchestrating delivery over SMTP is not rocket science. But getting that email to not be rejected totally IS rocket science and it's simultaneously an art form known only to a handful of email nerds working at the core of the big email sending services...

pupppet: After ticking every documented box to get out of AWS SES sandbox mode and being told nope and we can't tell you why, I'm all for this.

cdrnsf: The same people that think letting OpenClaw access their inbox is a good idea.

slig: It's very easy to get started with Resend, and they have a free tier that basically works for any bootstrapped project, and by the time you have to upgrade, you can pay $20/m.

thomas_gauvin: 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.

esseph: [delayed]

password4321: Cloudflare is spending years of goodwill earned through technical skill, trending towards AI enshittification starting with their blog posts.

Meekro: 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.

thomas_gauvin: 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 wayThe agent angle in this post reflects what we're actually seeing from developers during our private beta. And the idea that an agent can have an inbox to communicate is a new piece in the developer toolbelt.

fernandotakai: >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?

Meekro: 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.

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.

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.

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

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/

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?

SleepyQuant: Funny timing—I actually set up Cloudflare Email Routing for my side project yesterday, just 18 hours before this announcement. The inbound side (catch-all forwarding to Gmail, MX/SPF auto-configured) took maybe 90 seconds tops. Honestly, the DX is night and day compared to the "Mailgun and SES dance" I remember doing five years ago.The missing piece for me was outbound. Since my newsletter ships from a subdomain, I ended up sticking with Beehiiv for the custom domain and DKIM because Cloudflare’s outbound wasn't live yet. This announcement definitely closes the loop—if the pricing stays at $0.35/1k, I’m seriously considering consolidating everything.Quick question for anyone who’s messed with the Workers email API in preview: does it play nice with the Agents SDK for a "read → classify → draft → approve" loop? I’m currently hand-rolling that workflow over IMAP for my 12-agent setup, and it’s easily the clunkiest, most frustrating part of the stack.

Joel_Mckay: 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

Meekro: 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 network." Though I'm sure that new incidents come up daily, Spamhaus themselves seem to disagree with the notion that SES's IP blocks have "poor reputations."[1] https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/how-...

Joel_Mckay: Whatever IP people temporarily host on a cloud incurs the prior users reputation.Again, using legitimate traffic to shim network spam is a common counter argument 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

gardnr: 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.

bridgetburch: 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.

potato-peeler: I can use this to set up my own custom mail service, like an alternative to gmail? Or at the very least, my own personal mail provider?

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

navigate8310: I've used their email relay services to forward it to my Microsoft account, every forward is rejected by Microsoft due to spam generated by Cloudflare. So I don't have much faith at least in their email services.

embedding-shape: Ok, but what about as a CDN/website-proxy/WAF? I know we don't have the same automated reputation-propagation as with email, but same thing supposedly happens there, where eventually you get turned off if you don't act on lawful requests, which is exactly why Cloudflare is unavailable in Spain during La Liga matches, because Cloudflare don't take piracy streams down.In theory, Cloudflare should take those down, when requested by legal means, but that doesn't matter. How sure are we that they'll act differently for email, instead of trying to get rid of the reputation system instead?> getting that email to not be rejected totally IS rocket science and it's simultaneously an art form known only to a handful of email nerds working at the core of the big email sending servicesIt really isn't, you need a clean IP and a clean domain, send handful of emails and you're pretty much whitelisted on most services out there. Maybe you'd say I'm one of the handful, but I personally know more than a handful others who also run their own email services, just like me, and besides the usual hassle of running your own service, as long as you don't spam, your emails will arrive as usual.

pocksuppet: Cloudflare acts on lawful requests during LaLiga matches. The problem was that the Spanish government doesn't want to bother doing things the lawful way because that takes too long. They want piracy to magically disappear and they'll randomly shut down more parts of the internet until it does. Actual illegal sports streams are not impacted by Cloudflare being down.

pocksuppet: Cloudflare will predictably shut down your account until you pay $150k. They will not transfer out any of your domains or files - they will be inaccessible until you pay $150k.

bob1029: I'm having a hard time figuring out if I could use this as a replacement for something like AWS WorkMail or E365. The "Agentic" inbox looks really nice, but is this intended for humans to use? I am really confused due to the marketing hype.

written-beyond: 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.

jedberg: The reason AWS does that is because there is a lot of base level work to verify you as "not a spammer" and to keep verifying you. So this is their way of making sure you pay the base cost.They could price per use, but it would have to start with a base fee that is about the same at 10,000 emails.

AnonC: > Everyone already has an email address, which means everyone can already interact with your application or agent. And your agent can interact with anyone.That’s a huge assumption unless you exclude several countries where people have a phone number but not really an email address (or even if they do, they may not know what an email address is) and exclude many very old (say, 70+) people who wouldn’t know what email is or what their email address is.Moving on, I assumed the title meant the launch of a new consumer email service or platform. Reading the announcement, it’s not. That was disappointing to me.

FlyingSnake: “Each agent gets its own identity from a single domain.“ That too on the edge, along with the futuristic CF Dev primitives.I had the same thought when I read this part. The $6MM investment on Agent Mail is in serious trouble right now.

tracker1: It's most likely people doing active development, willing to experiment on a test/beta platform... which probably correlates strongly with those testing/trying agent based workflows.

balupton: No mention in the announcement that it is restricted to the paid plans. Also no mentioned of it in the paid plan comparison.From the dashboard link:> Enable Email Sending Email Sending is currently only available with the Workers Paid plan. Upgrade your plan to start sending emails.

tracker1: You'd need to write your own mail protocol host/gateway on top of this service... Pop/smtp/imap, etc.Also, search is a bigger/harder issue to solve, assuming you want to support clients searching for emails without a full scan of their mailbox for matches.

efalcao: Hi, I work on this team at Cloudflare. We've been sending email for years via our free email routing product and email sending is built on top of the same infrastructure, code and knowledge.

tracker1: I hope you've (your org) been able to curate something resembling higher level contacts with Microsoft. They seem to be the single largest email provider that consistently has deliverability issues.

pfortuny: Cloudflare is, believe it or not, the owner of several IP blocked by Telefonica in Spain durong football matches. Soon to be tennis, basket, too.

written-beyond: The base fee doesn't need to be monthly, they can take $50 dollars as a one time registration verification fee. That should be enough to cover their compute costs for the year, specially when you pool in that from multiple customers. Who is spamming with 100 monthly emails? How much compute do they need to verify you aren't spamming. They can bake all of that into the pay per use price, they choose not to and I'm glad cloudflare is offering this.

jedberg: Maintaining the reputation of an IP address is the issue here. If one bad actor sends just a few emails that get marked as spam, the entire IP gets marked as bad. That's basically what you're paying for.Also, the person who just wants to send a few 100 emails a month is actually far more likely to be a spammer. So it's also a way for them to eliminate those folks.And lastly, the support burden can be high.AWS has basically said they only want serious customers, let the other guys worry about the small senders.

stewartjarod: And if you want a SaaS like experience for your own AWS, there is wraps.dev ;d

fny: I've been very happy with agentmail.to for a while with great success. You get 3K free emails per month with 3 inboxes. Paid tier starts at $0.20 per 1000 emails.Disclaimer: I don't work for agentmail.

tracker1: Not to oversimplify the issue... but you could probably run a small VPS and SMTP relay service that requires tls+auth and just relays all email from your domain through to API calls. You could probably get something operational in a couple hours with Claude Code.My first thought in reading this would be using this service and the default mail app's structure to back end typical email protocols so you can still use a regular email client to access/use the system as a gateway.That said, I still think Cloudflare is in a unique position to compete with gmail/m365 mail/calandar/contacts... possibly funding Thunderbird development to tighten the integration as a mail client.For that matter, I still think cloudflare is in a good position to create a new

karimf: Oh yeah for sure. At that point, using SES is probably a better option compared to running a VPS just for SMTP. I posted that to let them know that SMTP support is a requirement for some developers.

woodylondon: I would pay for Cloudflare Workers Paid ($5) in a heartbeat and currently use the free version of cloudflare for all my DNS / Hosting etc. Where it does not meet my needs i have Dokpoly + Digital Ocean. I would use CloudFlare Containers. I currently pay for resend.com for all my email API needs.The problem is that once you're on the paid plan, you're exposed to unlimited risk if your worker goes crazy due to a stupid code bug or if you're hacked. As a solo dev, it's a risk I simply cannot take; I could wake to a bankruptcy bill from Cloudflare. Even as a company, an employee could sign you up and your accounts team would have no idea of the risk.I am using Supabase at the moment, and see they have a hard cap now. and so does Vercel after they had some nightmare stories of large bills in the past.I am not sure why / what CloudFlare think about this - or simply dont care.

laurisbernhart: 100% agree. Spending limits for Workers would be a game changer.There are many services I wanted to use Workers for but ended up with some self hosted service simply because I can't properly limit my monetary risk here.

CWwdcdk7h: > We raised $6M in Seed FundingWell that part was impressive. It looks like they focused on receiving emails, that is probably even worse, as I expect OpenAI/Anthropic to add such ability directly to agents, if it really is useful.

strbean: > It looks like they focused on receiving emailsThat's wild. $6M for an MCP server for SMTP?

creatonez: Agent-produced emails are by definition spam. Everyone should be reacting to this news by immediately blocking your service.

spaghettifythis: As an aside, this company's services seem incredibly sketchy - they let you have fake residential or commercial addresses so you can pretend to have a US office or other address

_adamnt: Shameless plug: Email is the most accessible interface in the world, that's why I built https://botwerk.com and https://aleik.com

agentifysh: so I have to ask, what is the pricing? This solves a major annoyance of having to use Resend. I just want to be able to send some confirmation emails but I have to pay extra for each domain I add. I am ready to migrate to Cloudflare Email Service if the pricing is competitive.It's next to impossible to get approved on Amazon SES now vs 10 years ago. I don't know why its so ridiculous difficult to use it for transactional verificaiton emails.I see AWS screwing up and Cloudflare replacing it.

john_strinlai: >Everyone already has an email address, which means everyone can already interact with your application or agent. And your agent can interact with anyone.please no.>Sending email that actually reaches inboxes usually means wrestling with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. When you add your domain to Email Service, we configure all of it automatically. Your emails are authenticated and delivered, not flagged as spam.this is going to be an absolute nightmare for spam. i cant exactly block all of cloudflare...it would be nice if anyone at cloudflare could write about how they plan to proactively reduce abuse of this feature, how they will respond to spam reports, what the punishment for abuse will be, etc.

tredre3: > i cant exactly block all of cloudflare...That's what potential buyers are counting on. Pricing is decent, but imho that is the true value proposition here.

ignoramous: > One thing that surprised me is the price-- Cloudflare's cloud offerings are usually much cheaper ... This new offering is 3x the AWS price, though. Weird.c. 2022 I used Cloudflare's free email sending service (via MailChannels) [0] until it was sunset in Aug 2024 [1].[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...[1] https://support.mailchannels.com/hc/en-us/articles/456589835... / https://archive.vn/xNLzv

wang_li: 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.

i_think_so: Make that penalty $1 per (so the discussion can be taken seriously) and I will not only support your proposal, I'll volunteer my time and effort in encouraging Congresscritters to vote for it.There are serious financial penalties for robocallers who violate the Do Not Call list (in America, at least). Let's update those laws for the 21st century, shall we?

embedding-shape: 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 unresolved Spamhaus Blocklist (SBL) listings [3], it is clear that the state of affairs at Cloudflare’s Connectivity Cloud looks less than optimal from an abuse-handling perspective. 10.05% of all domains listed on Spamhaus’s Domain Blocklist (DBL), which indicates signs of spam or malicious activity, are on Cloudflare nameservershttps://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/too-...

computershit: > 10.05% of all domains listed on Spamhaus’s Domain Blocklist...are on Cloudflare nameserversNot defending spammers, but this comes across a smidge naive considering Cloudflare's overall footprint in the modern internet.

ttul: I run an email sending service at scale (billions of messages per month, tens of millions of end users, thousands of customers). Most of our software development and operational effort revolves around abuse mitigation. That has been the case for 15 years. It's a cat-and-mouse game with two different mice: the senders, who are constantly trying to figure out how to get you to deliver their garbage; and the receivers, who are constantly trying to figure out how to block it. We're stuck in the middle.It's hard to appreciate how difficult this battle is when running at scale.

i_think_so: > I run an email sending service at scale (billions of messages per month, tens of millions of end users, thousands of customers).Giving you the benefit of the doubt and accepting your claim, doesn't that make you one of the people at least second-order responsible for the current state of affairs in email blocking? It would seem that your company, by dint of your volume, navigates roadblocks that the rest of us (ie. the 99.999% of Internet email servers and their admins), who aren't FAANG et al[1], have to deal with to get our users' legitimate email delivered.If so, could you perhaps give us a brief explanation as to why an otherwise competent engineer can "follow all the best practices" with their server which has no known compromises[2], on an IP address they have controlled for, oh, let's say a full calendar year, and yet still can't get off those FAANG et al default-deny blocklists, but you can?[3]A cynic might say that your service had a vested interest in paying for unimpeded access to those FAANG et al companies to get over the bar that the rest of us are unable to vault. A cynic might also say that those biggest of the big email services like it that way, because it drives more users to them at the expense of the rest of us 99.999%.I'll try to remain open to the possibility that there are aspects of the industry I've not yet had any exposure to, and refrain from chimping out over having my users blocked through no fault of their own.[1] Yes, I know, Facebook doesn't receive anywhere near as much email as they send, and Hotmail = Microsoft, etc. If I used an accurate acronym I could pat myself on the back for being Technically Correct, while nobody would know what the heck I was talking about.[2] We shan't digress into a discussion of hardware/firmware/OS/application backdoors nor Snowden disclosures. It's not that hard to auto-install security updates and run a reasonably tight ship with no unnecessary attack surfaces.[3] Or perhaps there aren't any default-deny blocklists at all, but in fact only much smaller default-allow whitelists? That would be cynical indeed.

slig: See https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/pri...

jiveturkey: > One thing that surprised me is the [high] price [vs S3 for example]Not sure if you read the announcement closely:> Sending email that actually reaches inboxes usually means wrestling with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. When you add your domain to Email Service, we configure all of it automatically. Your emails are authenticated and delivered, not flagged as spam.this service is batteries included. S3 is not.

magguzu: This isn't unique to Cloudflare. Microsoft email spam filter absolutely sucks. I hit it a lot too from my small provider.

tentacleuno: I recall them actually marking Microsoft emails as spam. Not sure if that's even changed.

arpinum: The pricing is disappointing. I'm surprised Cloudflare has not tried to compete on price against AWS lately after a good start with R2. Queues, database storage, database writes, worker invocation all more expensive than the AWS offering.

TurdF3rguson: Can you back that up with a link? You're saying Lambda is cheaper than Workers?

pier25: Pretty good pricing.Currently using ZeptoMail ($2.5 per 10,000 emails) but if this service by Cloudflare proves reliable once it reaches GA I'd be happy to switch.

chrysoprace: Unless I've misunderstood something, the Cloudflare price is like 3x of AWS SES. It probably won't matter for small scale products, but it definitely makes a difference at a large scale.

weird-eye-issue: Have you done the math on this because it's actually very, very difficult to blow up your Cloudflare bill compared to something like Vercel or Firebase.For example 1 million requests to a Worker is only $0.30 and there's no bandwidth charge. Similar for R2, Pages, etc.Also I believe their rate limiting rules have been completely free for one or two years now.

pier25: You have to use AWS though :)Also Cloudflare is way cheaper compared to eg Sendgrid or Postmark.

m463: they are a gatekeeper, and along with DDOS protection, they are also setting defacto internet policies, like what browser you should use to access websites.

diimdeep: [delayed]

austhrow743: Just a cloud dev infrastructure provider like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.

gls2ro: I think it is possible.I was reading the pricing page for workers and here is what it says there:> To prevent accidental runaway bills or denial-of-wallet attacks, configure the maximum amount of CPU time that can be used per invocation by defining limits in your Worker's Wrangler file, or via the Cloudflare dashboard (Workers & Pages > Select your Worker > Settings > CPU Limits).Link: end of example 4 section: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/

weird-eye-issue: Limiting CPU time for a single invocation of a worker is more for catching bugs in code that is using more CPU than expected and is not whatsoever effective as a hard limit on spending...

Hamuko: How awful is the reputation on those IP addresses going to be?

lagniappe: It's cloudflare, they type iddqd before every request.

rc_kas: what is iddqd?

lagniappe: god mode code from Doom

chrisandchris: > billions of messages per monthJust tangential, but maybe that is part of the problem, isn't it? Napkin math tells me that esch person in the world receives every month an e-mail from you, and you're obviously just one of hundres of providers, and only half of the population actially has e-mail... I think you get the point.E-Mail got to the point where it's actually worse then physical mail to some degree. Physical mail at least has a hurdle for the sender, and it's easier to throw away without even looking at it. The amount of low-quality mail and annoying, unnecessary notifications I receive is just at a level where I really think of dropping e-mail except for absolute becessary services.

big-and-small: Spamhaus itself is a shady and non transparent organization and basically one of reasons why its been so hard to actually run email service for decades.Cloudflare is not perfect, but at least it been consistent about not becoming censorship service with very few exceptions where they banned something.Id rather let criminals freely buy and use kitchen knives than let shady organizations control who is allowed to buy one.