CloudFlare works so well for so many use cases it's hard to justify not using it. I previously used it to get to my internal home network using the standard product and IP range whitelists (plus some additional secrets).
I currently have it running on top of some ancient legacy appengine apps to clean up domains/URLs, add a caching layer and keep my costs at basically zero overall (workers doing a little bit of work as well).
I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well.
It's like Twilio: there just isn't anyone near from a competitor perspective. As long as they keep improving, they are so far ahead it's their game to lose.
And just to clarify: I do everything on the free tier.
I did exactly this literally last week with the combination Cloudflare Email Forwarding to receive emails and Amazon SES as an SMTP relay to send emails (from any address) on my domains. Works exceptionally well and moving away from my legacy G Suite has been seamless, and one less account to login to.
One feature I would love for Cloudflare to add is the ability to Reject emails to specific addresses. Drop works as an alternative because it doesn't deliver the email, but still validates that the address exists. Having Reject as an option will tell the sender that this address is invalid.
After reviewing all my options I think I’m personally going to set up Amazon SES as SMTP sender for my personal email when I move off gmail. Use hetzner dedicated server for receiving email, along with a raspberry pi/home lab server in my house over fiber (failover between them).
Deliverability concerns have me scared to use anything that’s not a proven strong success for outgoing mail and SES seems very affordable for sent emails, especially if it’s not receiving them.
Use us @ https://PretzelBox.cc! It’s built on top of AWS SES. You get an inbox for your domain so emails sent to any email address you give out sit in a bucket inside your PretzelBox.
Plus we have a few extra features like blogging from your inbox (like Hey World) and a cdn to host and share images and files.
This looks awesome! Thank you so much for building it and for reaching out here. Very glad I found it.
The biggest feature I “need” is to be able to send emails from any address on my domain even though I only want one login / one inbox. I’d like any wildcard addresses to go to that inbox as well:
So my intended workflow is:
1) Sign up at www.vendor1.com using vendor1@mydomain.com (even if this address is not already registered on my incoming mailserver)
2) Any emails sent to *@mydomain.com should just go to my single unified inbox.
3) When I send an email I’d like to be able to specify to send from runnerup@mydomain.com or vendor1@mydomain.com (or anything else for that matter). Re: Replies would ideally automatically have the sending email filled in as whatever email was used to reach me in the previous email that I’m replying to. I’d like this to be accomplished without the typical use of reply-to or alias, so that the email headers looked perfectly normal for all outgoing emails as if it were a real account.
Curious how much of this functionality your service could support. I was planning to build it all myself so I’d still be happy to build it on top of your service, as long as wildcard sending and receiving could be supported.
Finally, purely out of curiosity (it doesn’t affect my decision), what are your plans for monetizing the free users?
Also some other notes (while reiterating that I like the idea of your service and like that you reached out to me here):
- I can see one of your testimonials is from a technical woman who runs a blog at ——-@moogle.com which is also the domain linked in your HN profile. The testimonial came across as “I had my friends try this and this really was their genuine response but we ‘marketing-ized’ her response” and then seeing the same domain on your profile confirmed the initial reaction. That’s fine but eventually getting some testimonial from someone with gravitas, or just stating “our customers like x, y, z” might make it feel more genuine. The testimonial from “ Sandhya K Assistant Professor, Economics @ MDAE” worked super well, and almost could have been even higher on the splash page because it was the first thing my brain said “ah okay cool I’m starting to see exactly what this product they’re selling is, and it’s potentially right for me”
- I’d love a little animation or additional explanation about how the buckets work. Do they need to be set up ahead of time, does each ‘bucket’ count as an “account” for billing tier purposes, etc
- Pricing page isn’t immediately clear what paying $30/mo actually gets you. Having the features side by side with similar open bullets vs filled in bullets to signify “this is included, this is omitted” helps instantly figure out what the end user value prop is. This info could also be on the landing page. I get suspicious of “click here for pricing” because I worry it will make me email someone and there wont be publicly posted prices. Something about the button style for pricing on main page implies “contact us for pricing info”
- I see now on the notion blog the following verbage[0]. I’m not sure if my use case above is truly your target user story, but had I seen this blurb at the beginning of the main page is already be signed up before typing all this! It’s the perfect summary, at least for my user story.
0:
> With PretzelBox, they can hand out as many email addresses they want without provisioning them upfront at no extra charge to different audiences.
> E.g., their affiliates can use *affiliates@my-business.com* while inbound sales enquiries can be handled by *sales@my-business.com.*
> The best part is the all these emails received by these different email accounts are automatically forwarded to the email account used to sign up for PretzelBox so while vendors and customers alike think they are communicating with a company with a different departments to manage different facets of their business, behind the scenes there is a far smaller team managing the show.
Thank you for the detailed response and questions!
Yes, it’s possible to send emails from whichever email you received an email on. E.g., if you receive an email at vendor@my-domain.com, you can reply from vendor@my-domain.com or optionally runnerup@my-domain.com. Of course, AWS SES manages sending reputation very carefully so email sending might involve some paperwork.
Yes, one of the testimonials is from a moogle user..and it does seem very “you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours”-ish but here’s the backstory. While I was ideating PretzelBox, moogle was the brand name under which I launched the blogging piece of PretzelBox.
I’ll look into your other suggestions and explain/highlight them more on the home page if possible.
I’d love to have you as a user given that we probably match 80% of your states needs. I’m available at Sai @ PretzelBox.cc if you want to follow up.
I use SES for sending + a forwarding service for receiving and the combination works well. Usually my SES bill is a few cents and AWS just waives the bill.
Just echoing the comment above. Cloudflare email forwarding would perfectly replace the free google apps that is being eliminated if it would allow sending emails as well. Even if it was heavily throttled / limited so people don't use it for transactional emails.
Top tip: if you want to try using iCloud Mail now that they support bringing your own domain, you may find yourself stuck when you realise they only support a few addresses per domain.
CloudFlare will forward all mail, so if you used to use your domain for catch-all (to see who passed your address along to spammers) this can let you keep those addresses working, which I realised I probably should if I wanted to be able to do password resets.
Totally agree. I love Cloudflare. I recommend it even for small businesses. It's easy to use and scales beautifully.
The article says:
> My issue arose when I realized that they remove your SSL certificate, then use their own. Cloudflare is a big MITM service.
All you have to do is change one setting in the DNS record (from Proxied to DNS Only) and you totally bypass the Cloudflare reverse proxy for that resource. So you can use your own SSL cert (if that's your thing). And you can still use Cloudflare access/zero trust with that resource. And solid and free DNS service. And cheap domain renewals.
Cloudflare is a great set of tools for many use cases.
I quite like being able to firewall to their IP ranges and then use client certificate auth as well. Yes it’s almost certainly overkill but it means I can be certain that all my traffic is coming via Cloudflare which gives some additional comfort.
I'm not sure if I understand your use-case, but if you want forward emails from a whole domain to your (private) address there is https://improvmx.com/
I currently have it running on top of some ancient legacy appengine apps to clean up domains/URLs, add a caching layer and keep my costs at basically zero overall (workers doing a little bit of work as well).
I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well.
It's like Twilio: there just isn't anyone near from a competitor perspective. As long as they keep improving, they are so far ahead it's their game to lose.
And just to clarify: I do everything on the free tier.