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.

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.

$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...

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.

This is simply the framing device that all marketing needs to present these days.

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.

Things developers believe about email

[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-origin [2] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery

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/

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.)

How's that compare?

https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/setup/mta-st...

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.

Disclaimer: I don't work for agentmail.

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.

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.

Cloudflare just filled a huge gap.

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.

If they establish a solid email solution I will likely use that for some of the projects I'm hosting there.

It's next to impossible to get approved on Amazon SES now vs 10 years ago. I don't know why its so ridiculous difficult to use it for transactional verificaiton emails.

I see AWS screwing up and Cloudflare replacing it.

Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.

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.

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

It would be interesting to send GDPR requests and have Cloudflare figure out all of the parties who got or use your mail.

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.