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.
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.
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.
It's hard to appreciate how difficult this battle is when running at scale.
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?
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.
> 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-...
Then how about not market it as "for agents" when said agents are just LLM output?
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
legit question: did you invite anyone that isn't doing agentic whatever during your beta?
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
[1] https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/how-...
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
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.
They could price per use, but it would have to start with a base fee that is about the same at 10,000 emails.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
Cloudflare just filled a huge gap.
$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...
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.
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.
"Please stop talking about the thing we can't stop talking about"
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.
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.
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.
I had the same thought when I read this part. The $6MM investment on Agent Mail is in serious trouble right now.
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).
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.