Saturday, December 7, 2024

Using Cloudflare Mail To Build Your Own Free Mail System

12/07/2024 Cloud

This post shows you how to create your own unlimited email boxes in CloudFlare and how to receive emails and send emails.

Cloudflare Email Routing

Cloudflare Email Routing is a free and private way to create and manage unlimited email addresses,

which can create custom email addresses for your domain and route messages to your preferred inbox — all without ever exposing your primary email address.

Benefits:

Private by design & anti-spam
Free and easy to configure
Advanced analytics
Process emails programmatically

Note: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/

Enable Email Routing

1 Make sure your domian has been added into Cloudflare

You should be able to see your domain status is active.

2 Click into your domain then click email / email routing from left menu panel:

3 Create a custome address

4 Add Email Routing DNS records

5 Email Routing's Settings once all email routing DNS records added in.

6 Routing Rules and Catch All

Enable Catch All rule.

Send Emails using Gmail

Create App Password:

https://security.google.com/settings/security/apppasswords

To create an app passwords, your account will need to enabel 2 step verification first.

Add another email address into your Gmail account's settings .

Accounts and import

Change the configuration in the page of Send Mail Through Your SMTP Server:

Here is the configuration :

smtp server is : smtp.gmail.com

Username is gmail address

Password is the apppassword configured before.

Now you can send out emails using your own domain email address, although it will still show via gmail.com.

Cloudflare SPF configuration

An SPF record defines the mail servers and domains that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. Each domain can have one SPF record, but the record can specify additional servers and third parties that are allowed to send email from your domain.

Add Google.com 's spf info into txt dns record, which allow gmail to send our domain's emails:

"v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net include:_spf.google.com ~all"