The zen of unlimited email addresses on your own domain with Cloudflare

A while ago I wrote about how I abandoned self-hosted SMTP and found a viable low-cost alternative in Amazon SES. The ironic thing is that by not hosting my own SMTP service, I can now self-host all sorts of other things that depend on SMTP to function. Am I completely free? No. Am I more free than before? Yes, I think so. Bend rather than break

Anyway, there's not much point in being able to send emails without receiving them. You probably own somedomain.com, and you want to be able to easily set up unique addresses at that domain and pick up the mail somehow. This short post is here to tell you that like SMTP, self-hosted POP3 and IMAP are worth abandoning too. Come on over to the darkside, we have Cloudflare Email.

If your domain uses Cloudflare as a DNS, you can use Cloudflare as a routing service for any fictitious email address on that domain. It's easy to set up - Cloudflare's dashboard will walk you through it better than I can. Set up some MX records on the DNS dashboard, then pick how email is handled. You can f.egs forward incoming mail to any number of other email addresses you want.

That's it - short and sweet. I love using email, but I hate wasting time on managing the clunky infrastructural mess the open source community left us with. Hopefully one day we'll get a better source project, and until then, Amazon and Cloudflare have you covered. And no, I am not affiliated with either.