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.

• embedding-shape

  today at 3:20 PM

  > 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

    today at 3:34 PM

    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...

    • embedding-shape

      today at 3:39 PM

      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 services

      It 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.

      • ttul

        today at 4:45 PM

        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.

        • embedding-shape

          today at 7:55 PM

          Right, I won't disagree with any of that, but I'm not sure how it's related to what I wrote either. Maybe I should have been more specific that I'm talking about hosting your own email, not hosting emails for others, which brings out a lot of other types of problems.

        • pbronez

          today at 4:56 PM

          What structural changes could we make to improve the situation?

          • ttul

            today at 8:46 PM

            That is such a great question and there is no easy answer. There have been enormous efforts to do better for at least the last 20 years. An entire organization, M3AAWG, was founded for that reason and it meets three times a year, bringing together all the people that matter for making the situation better. It's a great organization and the people are all really smart and awesome. The IETF is no slouch either, coming up with excellent new standards and improving existing ones, such as the recent update to DKIM.

            That's about as good of an answer as I can provide: keep sending smart people to the conferences!

          • edoceo

            today at 5:21 PM

            Signed senders?

          • jgalt212

            today at 5:54 PM

            Hashcash, or BTC.

          • b112

            today at 6:00 PM

            It's simple, there's a standard, a new one, which takes into account SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC, and even DANE along with upcoming and purposed SPKF, DKIM+, DMARC2, and ARCv4. It should fix just about everything.

      • pocksuppet

        today at 4:54 PM

        Cloudflare acts on lawful requests during LaLiga matches. The problem is 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, and Cloudflare is not the only impacted network.

        • embedding-shape

          today at 7:56 PM

          > problem is that the Spanish government doesn't want to bother doing things the lawful way because that takes too long

          In Spain, what they are doing, is the "lawful way", it's literally happening via the courts and judges. Do you think ISPs are blocking Cloudflare specifically just for fun, out of their own accord?

          > Actual illegal sports streams are not impacted by Cloudflare being down, and Cloudflare is not the only impacted network.

          Some are, many aren't. Cloudflare is indeed the only impacted network, at least for me. Which other networks are being blocked for you during the La Liga matches?

          • Dylan16807

            today at 8:36 PM

            The specific blocks don't go through courts and judges.

  • thomas_gauvin

    today at 3:43 PM

    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.

    • embedding-shape

      today at 3:49 PM

      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 nameservers

      https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/too-...

      • Meekro

        today at 4:19 PM

        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/

    • creatonez

      today at 8:52 PM

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

    • Bender

      today at 4:26 PM

      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.

    • chinathrow

      today at 6:58 PM

      > We're well aware of this.

      Then how about not market it as "for agents" when said agents are just LLM output?

    • themafia

      today at 7:42 PM

      So what are the thresholds?

      For example with SES I will get automatically suspended if my bounce rate is more than 10% or if my complaint rate is more than 0.1%.

    • wang_li

      today at 4:25 PM

      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.

• sixhobbits

  today at 3:22 PM

  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.

  • pocksuppet

    today at 4:53 PM

    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.

    • b2m9

      today at 4:57 PM

      Excuse me, what are you referring to?

      • foolswisdom

        today at 5:25 PM

        There have been stories about people with heavy internet traffic (generally media streaming I think) being more or less shut down unless they upgrade their cloudflare plan (to enterprise I guess). Some were posted on HN in the past.

        • NoahZuniga

          today at 6:58 PM

          And a gambling site

      • today at 6:37 PM

• navigate8310

  today at 4:42 PM

  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.

  • magguzu

    today at 9:01 PM

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

  • tracker1

    today at 5:36 PM

    Of all email services, delivery to MS hosted systems is absolutely the worst to deal with. It's completely opaque and almost impossible to resolve most of the time. They tend to direct you to paid channels to try to mitigate issues instead of actually responding to complaints for false positive flagging as spam.

    For my small, personal email server, I just gave up on trying... I can deliver to Gmail and every other major email provider without issue, and even MS seems to be split into a couple different backing orgs.

• Onavo

  today at 4:09 PM

  > 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.

• EGreg

  today at 6:27 PM

  Can Cloudflare do an SMS service? That would be something :)

• password4321

  today at 3:32 PM

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

  • gpi

    today at 4:30 PM

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

    • foresto

      today at 4:56 PM

      > what is cloudflare exactly?

      Man-in-the-middle and gatekeeper of (large parts of) the web.

      It's getting harder and harder to participate online without being subject to their surveillance and/or approval.

      • gpi

        today at 5:20 PM

        That's a good way to put it.

    • pfortuny

      today at 6:40 PM

      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.

  • Meekro

    today at 3:38 PM

    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

      today at 3:50 PM

      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 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.

      • Meekro

        today at 3:59 PM

        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.

      • fernandotakai

        today at 3:59 PM

        >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?

        • tracker1

          today at 5:39 PM

          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.

        • Meekro

          today at 4:03 PM

          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.

      • dbbk

        today at 4:02 PM

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

    • gardnr

      today at 4:23 PM

      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.

• Joel_Mckay

  today at 3:25 PM

  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

    today at 3:32 PM

    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

      today at 4:24 PM

      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

      • tracker1

        today at 5:44 PM

        Are those hosts using hosted VPS instances, or are they sending through SES? There's a pretty significant difference... FWIW, I get why a lot of VPSes simply block email hosting altogether. It makes it a bit harder for me to find a host for my own small server, but I do understand the pain. Some services are better or worse, and I can imagine at the scale of many cloud hosts, trying to keep the IPs for general hosting out of blocklists would impact the bottom line more than reputational damage for a handful of legit email hosting accounts.

        TBF, the demo app referenced in TFA and depending on how many emails you actually send for however many domains may well be a better option for me than my small MTA server.

• arpinum

  today at 4:39 PM

  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.

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.

• written-beyond

  today at 4:17 PM

  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

    today at 5:04 PM

    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.

    • written-beyond

      today at 5:36 PM

      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

        today at 6:39 PM

        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.

  • purrcat259

    today at 7:05 PM

    Scaleway TEM offer pay per use. I moved off of resend when my side project went beyond their free tier and now pay <0.5€ a month

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.

• Youden

  today at 3:03 PM

  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.

  • freefaler

    today at 4:45 PM

    The legacy compatibility of the protocol has brought all the hacks on top of it for identity verification like SPF, DMARC, DKIM ...

    Even with those, the amount of farmed accounts from a reputable platforms is still high, and it will go higher with the cheap AI targeting that will make the texts much more well crafted and spam filters much more aggressive.

    My other conjecture is that the big mail providers would have enough data to catch the spammers based on a number of signals.

• xhkkffbf

  today at 3:04 PM

  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.

  • nutjob2

    today at 3:19 PM

    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.

• ajsnigrutin

  today at 3:01 PM

  I'd be happy if we at least started punishing the large, well known and established companies for spamming us...

  ...you know the one, where you have email preferences, and you only have "new messages" and "commercial offers" in the settings, and you uncheck the "commercial offers" and think you're sae. Then you get a spam email from them... check the preferences again, and there's a "new product notification" preference, checked by default, and you uncheck that too. Bam! another spam! "personalized offers" option appeared, check by default. "limited time offers". "value deals", etc.

Pricing:

$0.35 per 1,000 emails

Here 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...

• pier25

  today at 7:04 PM

  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.

  • ghoshbishakh

    today at 8:08 PM

    Why not use SES?

    • pier25

      today at 8:46 PM

      I just avoid AWS as much as I can.

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.

• shauntest12321

  today at 9:02 PM

  Awesome, checkout https://ainative.email

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?

• tclancy

  today at 2:40 PM

  I knew I hung onto that C64 cassette player for a reason! Beyond the new Sturgill album, I mean.

• verdverm

  today at 3:22 PM

  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/

• doublerabbit

  today at 3:02 PM

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

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.

• bakugo

  today at 3:20 PM

  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"

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?

• bridgetburch

  today at 4:34 PM

  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.

• FlyingSnake

  today at 5:40 PM

  “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.

• nozzlegear

  today at 2:52 PM

  > new startups having moats thinner than Durex are thinking

  Haha, great visual. Really illustrative of what these AI startups and bootstrapped indie developers are dealing with (and, if I had to guess, why most of them don't go anywhere).

• CWwdcdk7h

  today at 2:51 PM

  > We raised $6M in Seed Funding

  Well 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

    today at 8:44 PM

    > It looks like they focused on receiving emails

    That's wild. $6M for an MCP server for SMTP?

• Kye

  today at 2:31 PM

  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.

• delfinom

  today at 2:25 PM

  Write an angry blog post about how big business is using their power to kill their _totally_ unique original idea that nobody could possibly copy in a hour?

• Hendrikto

  today at 2:18 PM

  The plan is to have exited by then. These people are mostly just grifters.

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

  today at 8:00 PM

  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.

• NicoJuicy

  today at 4:44 PM

  They are working on it

  Source : post on x from an employee

  Side note: the bills from cloudflare are much lower than the ones from AWS/Vercel when there's a mistake. The most I saw passing by was 150€, with Vercel and AWS > 10 k.

Not all email automation is spam and if you want your emails to not end up in spam folder, you pretty much have to go with Google Workspace and pay for essentially entire business suite when you just want to send emails. I needed something like this for my project and it's pretty much Google Workspace or nothing.

Cloudflare just filled a huge gap.

More spam at scale. I wish recipients of email had more control over the conditions to which the email is delivered to them, rather than after the fact curation…

• synkarius

  today at 2:29 PM

  Along these lines, I am experimenting with a two-tiered system where I use Proton's sieve filters to create a sender/cc/bcc whitelist for personal emails (which alert my phone) and a non-Proton collection of burnable aliases for everything else (which do not alert my phone). It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it is mitigating it pretty well so far.

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.

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.

> Everyone already has an email address

Things developers believe about email

• AtNightWeCode

  today at 3:58 PM

  Or the even worse category. People sharing email.

• arkaoss

  today at 3:16 PM

  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) .

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

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.

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/

• tracker1

  today at 6:04 PM

  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

    today at 7:17 PM

    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.

• scrollaway

  today at 7:29 PM

  Yeah one of their devs (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thomgo) said SMTP will be available, but I cannot find any info on this either. I'm glad to be switching from the horror that is Sendgrid, though. I migrated a few projects that have basic contact forms and it's been super easy so far.

> 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.

• tracker1

  today at 5:53 PM

  It is a new customer email service/platform... analogous to AWS SES for being able to send emails. They also have a baseline web email application.

  That said, would be nice if CF offered an analog to gmail/m365 email, contacts and calendars as a service to go along side the application access. As it is, I'd probably use a subdomain for service based emails, separate from user emails if using this service.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/reference/po...

Cloudflare is very transparent about their prefixes and reverse DNS, which is generally a good thing for the ecosystem! But it makes it trivial for operators who want to block the entire service, and extremely bad for Cloudflare's deliverability.

And while there are many open blacklists which I have no doubt Cloudflare monitors, there are many (including soft spam-classification signals) that are proprietary and difficult/impossible to monitor other than by watching rates of actual customer/prospect replies and engagement.

Amazon SQS has similar dynamics, and its reputation is far from stellar.

(If the Cloudflare team is reading this, and I'm missing an on-ramp to a company purchasing dedicated IPs with distinct PTR records, I do apologize! I'm not seeing documentation about this, though.)

$0.35 per 1,000 outbound emails. Unlimited inbound emails.

How's that compare?

• tom1337

  today at 2:26 PM

  AWS SES is 10ct per 1000 emails (same price for inbound + outbound) but you also need to pay for attachments etc.

• sammy2255

  today at 2:20 PM

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

  • tom1337

    today at 2:26 PM

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

    • sammy2255

      today at 2:31 PM

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

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.

I wish they had developed the open source Inbox into a consumer hosted email service for users. It would have been nice to see more competition with Google and Microsoft.

• rc_kas

  today at 7:53 PM

  Yeah I had thought this was what they were building when I first heard they had an email project. I guess not.

AI agents should be nowhere near email, full stop. Who comes up with this shit? Why would Cloudflare ruin their email deliverability by allowing this?

I am so excited for this. I’ve used Amazon SES begrudgingly for years and have wanted a better UI and easier routing level automation.

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.

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?

• efalcao

  today at 5:28 PM

  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

    today at 6:06 PM

    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.

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.

Good! However, ...

Sending and receiving is in my mind the easy part. The hardest part is to make this work with actual AI agents. This is the same problem as with sub-agent communication because you need to implement all kinds of additional fictionality to ensure the agent is not just responding for no good reason, go into loops, etc.

My $0.02 from experience.

> Email is the most accessible interface in the world

Email is one of the most gatekept interfaces in the world.

>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.

• cuu508

  today at 2:55 PM

  Sure you can, look at Spain ;-)

If I get one email from your agent, I'm torching your entire domain.

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?

• tracker1

  today at 6:09 PM

  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.

How might this affect https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/agentmail?

How easy is it to switch from other email providers?

$0.35 per 1,000 emails it's fair pricing.

Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.

• skc

  today at 2:53 PM

  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

  • bdangubic

    today at 2:56 PM

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

    • STRiDEX

      today at 3:25 PM

      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

        today at 3:35 PM

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

        • bdangubic

          today at 5:27 PM

          and you’d be 100% right!

      • stewartjarod

        today at 6:50 PM

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

      • slig

        today at 3:44 PM

        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.

finally, more spam!

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

  today at 3:12 PM

  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.

I’m really just curious how they guard against prompt injection. Otherwise this seems awesome.

How far off are we from Cloudflare releasing a Gmail competitor?

No thanks I'll keep my Mailgun. After 2.5M it's half the SES bill.

Sendgrid is such an enshittified product, I am grateful this now exists and integrates directly with tools I have on cloudflare already.

If we're letting agents send e-mail, what's the point of reading e-mail? Surely I can have an agent to reply to e-mail that other agent has sent. Do we really want to create dead internet?

I never got email routing to work. I doubt this will work in the general case.

This is a very long post just to say they're now running an SMTP server. I've been sending and receiving emails from Workers for two years; though for sending, you still need an external SMTP server like SES or Postmark.

Don't get me wrong, sending (and delivering) emails is genuinely hard. But we'll only know how good Cloudflare is at it after a couple years of real-world experience.

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

• lagniappe

  today at 2:38 PM

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

  • rc_kas

    today at 8:05 PM

    what is iddqd?

• dbbk

  today at 2:41 PM

  Good luck trying to send emails during a LaLiga match I guess

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.

Slop spam? Slam?

Another email sending service without support for idempotency?

• esseph

  today at 3:42 PM

  AFAIK there is no communication service or protocol on the internet designed with idempotency in mind. (That was worthwhile and adopted)

  • johtso

    today at 4:58 PM

    Sure, but this is not a protocol, this is an API. APIs that allow actions that cost money, potentially annoy users / effect your reputation in the eyes of email recipients, I believe, should allow the caller to supply a unique key to enforce idempotency.

    • esseph

      today at 5:27 PM

      Track state on your side.

      • johtso

        today at 7:30 PM

        It’s impossible to know whether an action completed successfully if an error occurs between sending the request and persisting the result

        • esseph

          today at 7:57 PM

          You also have no idea if it's been blocked or dropped before delivery unless you're using things like tracking pixels etc, right? And even then, that only works if they aren't being blocked (Proton Mail can do this, etc.)

          It just seems like this is trying to force something that was never remotely designed for it.

[flagged]

• Meekro

  today at 4:35 PM

  You mentioned a 12-agent setup with IMAP that you might consider migrating into this platform. Could you tell me more about the overall goal of the project? I'm curious because this whole "email+agent" thing that the article talks about strikes me as kind of strange, and I'm curious what the non-spam use cases are.

  • SleepyQuant

    today at 4:54 PM

    [flagged]

Ugh, who asked for this?

• cdrnsf

  today at 3:33 PM

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

• esseph

  today at 3:43 PM

  People wanting an AWS service but from Cloudflare instead of Amazon.

• bdangubic

  today at 2:58 PM

  Everyone paying $20/month to Resend et al to send few thousand emails