That's great - and maybe I'm cynical - but that's right where my mind went when I read that. Trading income for control isn't a bad game..
And always will be.
Are digital content creators lazy too? Why don't they just host their content on their own damn servers?
Do you talk to your customers with that mouth?
For those who are lazy to click, this guy's business is hosting and maintaining a sales platform for people.
(cloudflare customer, in both personal and professional capacities; i pay Fastmail to host family email; both can easily be switched if needed to prevent lock in, with DNS changes and in the case of hosted email, an export of mailboxes and tenant config)
That such a database has other uses would be a happy coincidence.
New but non-standard niche browsers are also problematic.
The ire should be reserved for if and when they establish some kind of monopoly or other anti-consumer practices, fall afoul of anti-trust law, and inevitably the US government gives them a free pass for criminality like it has been doing for years with dozens of other Big Tech mergers, rollups, exclusivity dealings, etc. and appears to have just done again with Google a few weeks ago.
It is fine for big companies to offer competing email sending services. It is not fine for them to break competition laws.
Also yes, please do set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for me. I may very well end up using this down the road because they say they'll do that for me and I just don't want to think about them in some situations.
I'm going to take this opportunity, because hopefully Cloudflare will see it, to request they support SPF record flattening natively.
Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something.
At least they’re not selling ads using your data.
I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?)
EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia.
Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit of problem to the internet.
Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.
internet is made sooo much better by negating all encryption effort of the last 20 years
Yet. Since it's an american company with an ever-growing influence, I dread and expect that to change, among other things, down the road. I assume the three-letter agencies also already MITM the traffic.
However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model.
IMHO it needs other enterprises entering the competition. Maybe it could be new more software defined mobile network providers offering edge compute. Maybe data from IoT could never enter the Internet and we could have some confidential computing power when we need it for our IoT stuff. Maybe we could get a more decentralized Internet again...
Sendgrid recently killed their free tier (100 emails per day) and their lowest plan is now $20/month for 50,000 emails. It's totally overkill for low traffic projects.
With a pricing structure like that it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam. Unfortunately I don't blame them.
The part where sendgrid has to keep figuring out how to make new and improved validation is expensive.
Barrier to entry for (12 * $20) is much higher than $10/year and they figure that was worth the tradeoff of losing small fish customers.
The lowest plan $40/year for 1k emails/month isn’t on the Pricing page, but you can select it when signing up.
The volume of spam (for me) doesn't seem to be decreasing from them, so there's a lot of moles to whack.
[1] Just a guess from looking at the last weeks [2] I know it's automated, but often there's 2 that come with the 2nd one stating it's acted upon, so i'm hopeful.
You can very reasonably and reliably expect spam amount to correlate with the cost of sending said spam or expected return. At any service. There used to be a time where you HAD to check your mailbox several times a week or it would (literally) overflow with spam.
They had it a few years ago, but the company offering the free integration essentially stopped offering the free part. I'm currently grandfathered in to mail channels.
This is neat but be careful using an LLM to parse email content. The demo is a BERT model which is a good but I can see how someone might swap this without realising the implications
Also really nice to see emails from workers, its something I have wanted for a while!
The kind of hoops I've had to jump through to achieve DIY idempotency with Postmark would make you cringe, a shared lock to avoid race conditions, and then using the API to check if an email with the unique id (manually added to the metadata when sending) has not already been sent before sending an email.
Being safe in the knowledge that an email with some unique key will only be delivered once regardless of bugs, processes dying mid task, network issues etc. just makes life so much simpler. The risk of sending duplicate emails or at worst spamming your users due to some more nefarious bug is something that you really want to guard against at as low a level as possible. Sure this might not be quite as consequential as duplicate charges through the Stripe API for example (Stripe have always seemed to lead the way with good API design in this regard).. doThing(data) is _not_ good enough for executing tasks over a network that are effectful, have a cost, and potentially risk your reputation if things go wrong. Idempotency keys should far more widely supported!
This is what I have...
Domain Name Registrar: Dynadot
DNS: Cloudlare
Hosting: Dreamhost
Email: Fastmail
Should everything be under Cloudflare? I think they also do domain name registration and now, soon email. Not sure off the top of my head if they do hosting.
Plus, Dynadot uses Cloudflare for their site, so you couldn't even change your nameservers if CF is down.
A random scatter won't protect you from a service like CF / AWS / GCP being down, and most users won't benefit from protecting from that sort of unlikely and major scenario anyway...
Ideally there would be a setup to avoid having the domain name registrar use a different DNS than me.
I'm more concerned if an over-zealous algorithm or employee shutting down an account and being able to just switch that one service to another company rather than losing everything.
What other "root" email services are there out there? Even Google Cloud doesn't provide one...
Sparkpost to my knowledge is built on SES.
Fwiw, not a knock against CF. I like their products, mostly simple, fair pricing, etc. Just a bit unfortunate commentary on the state of email infra on the internet.
when was the last time you got a reply to an email you sent?
But most people who can run a server should be able to setup OpenSMTPd with the DKIM filter and Dovecot. It's much easier than configuring postfix like we had to do in the past.
To answer a sibling comment, the last time I received an answer is a few minutes ago. The correspondent's email infra is hosted by Google.
I don't know why. At the same time they don't want to get rid of the bbdd servers, or the app servers.
Maintaining a email service must not be as easy for them.
The days of people running their own servers are gone because of the shortsightedness and laziness of IT managers. They though the "cloud" would be easier and cheaper, and they are now trapped.
All the email service that I could find has monthly subscription, no pay as you go offer. Hopefully, cloudflare will offer pay as you go.
Is there a way to get priority in waitlist? I don't mind bugs.
And eventually it'll be so popular other mailservers will stop accepting mail from any except cloudflare/ms/apple/etc.
I get that most people never feel the discimination and exclusion mediated by cloudflare because most people are just using chrome or whatever standard browser on their phones. But just because one doesn't have the lived experience of discrimination doesn't mean it isn't actively happening to lots of people.
The internet doesn't work if Matthew Prince gets to act as global gatekeeper, or if CloudFlare gets conscripted as the new PRISM or NSA censorship and surveillance apparatus whether they want it or not. Given the profit incentives and intense pursuit of control, it's apparent (to me, at least) they're positioning themselves to profit off of the next big horsemen of the infocalypse opportunity.
Centralized control and gatekeeping of the internet, private or otherwise, should be shunned. Sacrificing that for walled garden features is despicable.
Don't shit in the village well, even if the guy selling bottled water says he'll get you a great deal. There are better ways of doing things.
One thing I've grown concerned about, after watching the Twitter migration fizzle out, is we can imitate the old internet on a small scale, but on a large scale it just doesn't work. For Twitter specifically, the outcome was even worse, many users just migrated to other more centralized services or existing monopolies (like Instagram.)
Users are too used to being able to instantly stream 4k HDR 60fps. They are too used to limited amounts of spam. They are too used to having most non-agreeable content filtered. All of this stuff that big tech delivered now is replicate-able at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. The only business model that can pay for that is owning a giant ad platform.
Thinking about all of the issues the EU has had enforcing things like GDPR, which big tech companies largely haven't followed for years or straight up lied to their customers about, along with a possible failure of the DMA now due to tariffs.. and yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the US utterly failed to ban or control Tiktok. Endless announcements of upcoming deals that were either lies (Oracle protecting American's data) or postponements.
Meanwhile, all of the spam, hacking, bots, and DDoS attacks persist and grow, along with layer upon layer of (probably intentionally) poorly written and often conflicting legislation across multiple jurisdictions have truly made it impossible for the internet as it was designed and meant to exist to continue. (Sure you can just set up a basic web forum like you could do 20 years ago, not use Cloudflare, not host it at a major datacenter, and ignore all of the GDPR and age verification laws, but good luck. Hell, it doesn't even sound like it's really legal to run a Mastodon server anymore.)
One small hope is that if internet companies follow any pattern we've seen in other industries, when the growth ends, the managers will switch to tearing the conglomerates apart in to pieces and selling them off. One day CloudFlare might be split in to 30 pieces, along with Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. But it could be a while.
To quote Raytheon “Morals are cool but 90k/year sounds a lot cooler”.
If they launch an email service and are as successful, they could become the master of the email (25/465)
So soon, they'll be the master of the entire Internet
To be clear: I don't share this view, in part because Google and Microsoft already are the masters of the email
I am really excited to follow how their Containers platform matures as it is still too early.
WTF Cloudflare you are using a google form for the beta sign up?
Sign up to the waitlist here. https://forms.gle/BX6ECfkar3oVLQxs7
It shouldn't.
They are not launching a complete emailing service, this is just a service that you use to send emails from an app.
"Moving" to their service is as easy as updating your DNS records so they can be seen as an authorized sender.
Oh i didn't get that email.
Oh spam filter.
Oh so backlogged on email.
I went from hosting my own pop/imap/smtp email to ignoring it almost completely at work and personal for a variety of reasons.
Text messages and chat or X/message boards are all I use now. I have the same ability to deliver messages, content, forward, save, export, and migrate between platforms. The spam in SMS is tolerable at this point.
I hope it's easier to setup then the current mess of needing to use Wrangler to setup the send_mail binding the CF worker console can't even show in its binding list.
Topfi•1h ago