Comment by faangguyindia
7 hours ago
One of the well-kept secrets about Cloudflare is:
You can have a zero-cost inbox.
Earlier, I was using Zoho and FastMail (however you dice it, it will use some money, $12 a year for Zoho and $7 per month for FastMail? Even then, perhaps you only get one mailbox and some aliases)
but with this method, I get unlimited aliases, domains, and mailboxes:
Now, I wrote a script which captures the email and saves attachments to S3 using the HTTP API (why S3 and not R2? Because Cloudflare wanted a credit card, and I was too lazy to add it there lol) and emails to D1.
This uses an email -> webworker workflow.
I use an API to fetch my emails.
This means all my inbound emails are now handled by Cloudflare, and I can easily use all of it with zero payment.
The best part is this supports tokenised emails, so I can provide a unique email address to each service I sign up for.
I am using SES as the sender. I’ve set up one script which auto-sets up any domain in SES and auto-verifies the sender email.
The funniest thing is I am receiving zero spam? As if other email providers sell my email?
That's not a well kept secret, that's just a workflow that almost nobody would accept for their email setup which is the center of most people's digital identify and should always work and not be a duct taped construct to save a couple of bucks.
Here's my top-secret Rube Goldberg Machine that maintains my online identity.
isn't cloudflare webworker and email forwarding infra hyperscaling and highly available?
It's not about the uptime or scalability. Everyone has to make the choice for themselves if they value their time less than $12/year (Or free if Google is an option) for a critical part of their digital infrastructure to set all these moving parts up and keep them running over years.
I'll stick to Fastmail, where if something isn't working as expected I can just email them and get a response from a real human.
It doesn't change the fact that the workflow gp explains is a duct taped construct.
It's hyperscalable and highly available today, until the API changes.
Yeah it's highly available until it isn't and then that turns into your problem rather than something like Gmail just working
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On a related note they opensourced an email client: https://github.com/cloudflare/agentic-inbox
cf bought an email security company a couple years ago so wouldn’t shock me they have good spam filtering.
There’s a completely free tier of Zohomail which does more than what I need for a custom email.
yes but that's not good if you want programmatic inbound access which is what u need for many apps. That tier has no imap access.
That's pretty neat! What do you use to send and receive emails on your phone?
once you've emails stored, you can use any webclient.
you can write an api to imap adapter and use it in your favourite mail client
SES exposes SMPT directly.