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?

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dewey an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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faangguyindia 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

isn't cloudflare webworker and email forwarding infra hyperscaling and highly available?

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dewey 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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selcuka 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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weird-eye-issue 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah it's highly available until it isn't and then that turns into your problem rather than something like Gmail just working

	▲	faangguyindia 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		that's the thing it cannot stop working because webworker and email forwarding is very reliable, email itself has retries built it and soft bounce handling.

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twothumbsup 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

cf bought an email security company a couple years ago so wouldn’t shock me they have good spam filtering.

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fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's pretty neat! What do you use to send and receive emails on your phone?

	▲	faangguyindia 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.