[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Email Service
___________________________________________________________________
Cloudflare Email Service
Author : jilles
Score : 389 points
Date : 2026-04-16 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| bjord wrote:
| finally, more spam!
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Sure you can, look at Spain ;-)
| moribvndvs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I knew I hung onto that C64 cassette player for a reason!
| Beyond the new Sturgill album, I mean.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Can we go minidisc if we're going for obsolete tech?
| verdverm wrote:
| 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/
| spaghettifythis wrote:
| 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
| amazingamazing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tornikeo wrote:
| 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?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| The plan is to have exited by then. These people are mostly
| just grifters.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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?
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| CWwdcdk7h wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > It looks like they focused on receiving emails
|
| That's wild. $6M for an MCP server for SMTP?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _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).
| bridgetburch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Ugh, who asked for this?
| bdangubic wrote:
| Everyone paying $20/month to Resend et al to send few thousand
| emails
| cdrnsf wrote:
| The same people that think letting OpenClaw access their inbox
| is a good idea.
| esseph wrote:
| People wanting an AWS service but from Cloudflare instead of
| Amazon.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| $0.35 per 1,000 outbound emails. Unlimited inbound emails.
|
| How's that compare?
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Where did you find the pricing page? I can't find it anywhere
| tom1337 wrote:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-
| service/platform/pri...
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Thanks, hiding the pricing under a submenu called
| "Platform" is an .. interesting design choice
| tom1337 wrote:
| AWS SES is 10ct per 1000 emails (same price for inbound +
| outbound) but you also need to pay for attachments etc.
| Computer0 wrote:
| What is the minimum monthly amount though?
| Hamuko wrote:
| How awful is the reputation on those IP addresses going to be?
| lagniappe wrote:
| It's cloudflare, they type iddqd before every request.
| rc_kas wrote:
| what is iddqd?
| dbbk wrote:
| Good luck trying to send emails during a LaLiga match I guess
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not use SES?
| pier25 wrote:
| I just avoid AWS as much as I can.
| vlod wrote:
| It is a major pita dealing with the SES team. I originally
| wanted to send email from my web app (simply notification
| flow. i.e. you have a new request from user-123) and it is
| (IMHO) impossible to get past them. They won't tell you any
| reasons why. (Because they don't want devs gaming the
| system).
|
| Nothing I could do could convince them that I wasn't trying
| to do 'bad' stuff. Just gave up and decided not to use any
| AWS tech.
|
| Just used GMail api to send email.
| TimCTRL wrote:
| > Everyone already has an email address
|
| Things developers believe about email
| arkaoss wrote:
| 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) .
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Or the even worse category. People sharing email.
| freefaler wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| Youden wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ryangst_1 wrote:
| $0.35 per 1,000 emails it's fair pricing.
|
| Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.
| skc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Resend will change the pricing - guaranteed. Not sure how
| soon but I'd expect _very soon._
| STRiDEX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm betting a non-small chunk of these are users AWS
| wouldn't let out of sandbox mode.
| bdangubic wrote:
| and you'd be 100% right!
| slig wrote:
| 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.
| stewartjarod wrote:
| And if you want a SaaS like experience for your own AWS,
| there is wraps.dev ;d
| qJaskkT wrote:
| 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.
| nope1000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Scaleway TEM offer pay per use. I moved off of resend when my
| side project went beyond their free tier and now pay <0.5EUR
| a month
| btown wrote:
| 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.)
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm really just curious how they guard against prompt injection.
| Otherwise this seems awesome.
| yalogin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Meekro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pbronez wrote:
| What structural changes could we make to improve the
| situation?
| edoceo wrote:
| Signed senders?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Hashcash, or BTC.
| ttul wrote:
| I always loved the hashcash concept and actually raised
| our original funding because of it (our Microsoft angels
| loved the idea of making spamming more expensive, and our
| Series A concept was tar-pitting to dissuade botnets). In
| the context of email sending services, we have a modern
| version of hashcash that we might at some point turn to.
| If someone can figure out how to tokenize sending at
| scale, then senders could pay recipients to open their
| emails by attaching a "tip" to each message.
|
| If even a small fraction of legitimate email recipients
| altered their mail client settings to route "tipped"
| messages to their inbox, that would probably suffice to
| get senders to participate in the scheme. Senders are
| starved for high quality engagement data. Meanwhile,
| anything we can do to make spam less likely - on a
| relative scale - to reach the inbox in comparison to
| "legitimate" traffic, is a win.
| b112 wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/
| ttul wrote:
| 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!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| ttul wrote:
| Apologies. When you said "email services" I thought you
| were implying "email services for use by others". Yeah,
| you can definitely run your own mail server in 2026 and I
| think the internet community should always strongly
| endorse being able to do so. Unfortunately, large email
| receivers have to make do with imperfect signals when
| making filtering decisions, and your traffic from a
| lonely IP that happens to have a bad neighbour might get
| blocked as collateral damage.
|
| One long term hope: That domain name reputation
| eventually overtakes IP address reputation entirely.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The specific blocks don't go through courts and judges.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, the specific block of blocking Cloudflare in Spain
| during La Liga matches literally has gone through a court
| and been ordered by a judge, I'm not sure how you could
| have missed this. Judges have also dismissed the requests
| from Cloudflare and others to remove the "dynamic block"
| as there is collateral damage.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| My understanding was that cloudflare was being blocked by
| the same IP blocking list as everything else. And while
| that _system_ went through courts, the _list_ didn 't.
|
| There are also direct actions against cloudflare, but
| that's not what's taking everything down, is it?
|
| Did I misunderstand something?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The sites are directed to be blocked by IP and DNS, this
| is the list I suppose you're talking about, I'm not sure
| of any specific "system vs list" distinction. Since some
| of the sites are behind Cloudflare, some of the IPs are
| IPs used by Cloudflare for any customer, not just the
| streams, so then Cloudflare gets blocked wholesale, the
| collateral damage that we get to joyfully experience
| every game.
|
| Remains to be seen if the block will remain in place or
| not, you could argue it goes against some other laws, but
| it has to be argued legally, just like how the block
| initially happened because La Liga went through the
| courts. So far us developers or people who visit more
| American websites tend to be hit the worst, since they're
| talking about "protecting" other matches too, in other
| sports, I'm guessing it'll get worse before it gets
| better.
| thomas_gauvin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| wang_li wrote:
| 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.
| Bender wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > We're well aware of this.
|
| Then how about not market it as "for agents" when said
| agents are just LLM output?
| themafia wrote:
| 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%.
| creatonez wrote:
| Agent-produced emails are by definition spam. Everyone
| should be reacting to this news by immediately blocking
| your service.
| ttul wrote:
| Recent outreach after creating an AgentMail account:
|
| "Thanks for being a user of AgentMail - a lot of people
| use AgentMail for outbound (spin up and warm up inboxes,
| send sequences, handle replies), ..."
|
| Yes, that's right. The first use case mentioned is to
| send automated outbound emails. "Cold prospecting"
| workflows are likely going to be a big slice of usage on
| the new Cloudflare service, as it seems to be on
| AgentMail.
| ttul wrote:
| If you take the approach of policing individual sender
| accounts with a strict anti-abuse policy, you have a chance
| of succeeding. I'm sure you have already discovered that
| the moment you allow anyone to sign up for an email sending
| account, the worst of the worst actors immediately take up
| the opportunity to do so! Cloudflare has a massive amount
| of data about web traffic and I would hope that this data
| can be recycled into effective threat detection and
| control. No doubt you already know this and have people
| working on it. Good luck!
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Excuse me, what are you referring to?
| foolswisdom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And a gambling site
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| password4321 wrote:
| Cloudflare is spending years of goodwill earned through
| technical skill, trending towards AI enshittification starting
| with their blog posts and vibe coded features/products.
| Meekro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| It's just email man you do not need to throw an AI
| buzzword in front of everything
| gardnr wrote:
| 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.
| gpi wrote:
| Unfortunate situation. Also, what is cloudflare exactly? They
| seemed to have diversified a tad much.
| foresto wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| That's a good way to put it.
| pfortuny wrote:
| 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.
| Onavo wrote:
| > _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.
| arpinum wrote:
| 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.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| magguzu wrote:
| This isn't unique to Cloudflare. Microsoft email spam filter
| absolutely sucks. I hit it a lot too from my small provider.
| EGreg wrote:
| Can Cloudflare do an SMS service? That would be something :)
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| hardsnow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Awesome, checkout https://ainative.email
| johtso wrote:
| Another email sending service without support for idempotency?
| esseph wrote:
| AFAIK there is no communication service or protocol on the
| internet designed with idempotency in mind. (That was
| worthwhile and adopted)
| johtso wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Track state on your side.
| johtso wrote:
| It's impossible to know whether an action completed
| successfully if an error occurs between sending the
| request and persisting the result
| esseph wrote:
| 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.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| 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
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| If I get _one_ email from your agent, I 'm torching your entire
| domain.
| ttul wrote:
| How might this affect
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/agentmail?
| pupppet wrote:
| 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.
| opengrass wrote:
| No thanks I'll keep my Mailgun. After 2.5M it's half the SES
| bill.
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| Slop spam? Slam?
| freitzzz wrote:
| 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?
| edsimpson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah I had thought this was what they were building when I
| first heard they had an email project. I guess not.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I never got email routing to work. I doubt this will work in the
| general case.
| karimf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ksajadi wrote:
| 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.
| dgb23 wrote:
| 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.
| pradn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cbg0 wrote:
| How far off are we from Cloudflare releasing a Gmail competitor?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| 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.
| potato-peeler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| woodylondon wrote:
| 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.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| 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 150EUR, with Vercel and AWS > 10 k.
| laurisbernhart wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| AnonC wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| balupton wrote:
| 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.
| sltr wrote:
| > Email is the most accessible interface in the world
|
| Email is one of the most gatekept interfaces in the world.
| TimLeland wrote:
| How easy is it to switch from other email providers?
| schainks wrote:
| Sendgrid is such an enshittified product, I am grateful this now
| exists and integrates directly with tools I have on cloudflare
| already.
| fny wrote:
| 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.
| gck1 wrote:
| 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.
| creatonez wrote:
| 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?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Sounds like this is only for AI or something. Does it support
| normal usage or only """agents"""?
| paultopia wrote:
| Hah, what I wish Cloudflare would supply in the email space is a
| "prove you're a human" except for access to my inbox
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Pushing agent workflows over email has some risks not present for
| HTTP. Transit security is still a problem for email as we're
| stuck in the opportunistic encryption stage. If you decide to use
| email-based agents, look into MTA-STS as a way to prevent
| downgrade attacks. It looks like Cloudflare supports this, but it
| isn't enabled by default or called out in the on-boarding
| process.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/setup/mta-st...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-16 23:00 UTC)