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faangguyindiatoday at 4:41 AM5 repliesview on HN

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?


Replies

deweytoday at 5:22 AM

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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sim04fultoday at 6:48 AM

On a related note they opensourced an email client: https://github.com/cloudflare/agentic-inbox

twostorytowertoday at 6:46 AM

There’s a completely free tier of Zohomail which does more than what I need for a custom email.

twothumbsuptoday at 4:58 AM

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

fragmedetoday at 5:23 AM

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

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