Email

I just finished moving my Gmail “Send mail as” setup completely to Cloudflare Email Service’s native SMTP submission. I can send out emails under my mindflakes.com domain.

The short version is that I had built a small Rust SMTP-to-Cloudflare REST API relay in April. Today I noticed Cloudflare had shipped native SMTP submission.

Part of the appeal here is minimizing vendors. Cloudflare already hosts the domain, handles incoming mail through Email Routing, and now can handle outgoing mail through Email Service too. For a personal domain, that can be cheap or free, and it is a nice alternative to paying for Google Workspace when a personal Gmail account is otherwise fine.

The April hack

In April, I saw Cloudflare’s public beta announcement for Email Service and got excited about using Cloudflare for both inbound and outbound personal-domain mail.

Then I got sad. I wanted Gmail to send mail for one of my domains through Cloudflare Email Service, but I did not see a native SMTP submission path I could just point Gmail at.

Gmail’s Send mail as feature wants a normal authenticated SMTP server. You give it a hostname, a port, a username, and a password. Gmail talks SMTP. It does not want to be handed a REST API endpoint.