Cloudflare Email Service

bjord

finally, more spam!

john_strinlai

> 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.

moribvndvs

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?

amazingamazing

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…

tornikeo

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?

baal80spam

Ugh, who asked for this?

VikingCoder

$0.35 per 1,000 outbound emails. Unlimited inbound emails. How's that compare?

Hamuko

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

ghoshbishakh

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...

TimCTRL

> Everyone already has an email address Things developers believe about email

freefaler

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.

ryangst_1

$0.35 per 1,000 emails it's fair pricing. Looks better than fixed $20 for Resend.

qJaskkT

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

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.

btown

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

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

yalogin

Isn’t email already scriptable? What does cf provide that is different? I clicked on it assuming they are launching their own email service.

Meekro

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.

TechSquidTV

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.

hardsnow

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.