Did you know about Cloudflare email routing (forwarding) feature which is free?
Cloudflare has created a free email routing service that can create unlimited custom professional email addresses on your domain name. You can use these addresses to forward any emails you receive to any email box of your choice – whether it’s personal or for specific business inquiries.
It is perfect for people who want to use an email address like “[email protected]” and forward email to something like “[email protected]”.
A professional email address is an essential part of business branding and often the first impression that potential customers or partners will have of your company.
This guide will show you how to create a free professional email address with CloudFlare’s routing service.
Important Limitations to Keep in Mind
Before we dive into the setup process, it’s important to understand that Cloudflare Email Routing is currently still in beta, so it can be improved further. This is currently an email routing feature only, which means it’s only able to receive emails and forward them to whatever personal email address you have chosen.
You are not able to reply from that same professional email address – you will be replying from your personal email or the inbox you have connected to it. This is a forwarding-only service at this time.
Introduction
Individuals can make different custom email addresses for their different needs, so they don’t have to give out their personal email to every newsletter and business.
If you’ve got a family domain, or want to create one with Cloudflare Registrar, you can make unique email addresses for each family member or specific purposes like a custom address for your monthly bills.
For businesses, it’s essential to have different email addresses for various types of inquiries like sales and support, but managing who gets those emails can be a pain.
As your business grows, tasks that used to be handled by the owner often have to be passed on to others, which can be challenging to configure.
Luckily, Email Routing from Cloudflare makes it easy to create any number of email addresses that get redirected to the mailbox you, your family, or your team are already using.
Cloudflare Email Routing Features
Here are some of the features that Email Routing has to offer:
Privacy First
Email Routing is completely private. Cloudflare won’t snoop on or store the contents of the emails that get routed to your inbox.
Easy and Free
Creating custom addresses and forwarding messages to your preferred mailbox is free. DNS records are automatically created, and they’re safeguarded from accidental changes to make sure Email Routing doesn’t go haywire.
Superior Anti-Spam
We use advanced phishing detection technology to identify spam and prevent it from getting forwarded to your inbox.
Advanced Analytics
Get access to insights on the number of emails that were sent to you, whether they were forwarded or dropped, and delivery success at your destination mailbox.
Leverage the Cloudflare Network
Email Routing takes advantage of the Cloudflare network, which covers more than 285 cities in over 100 countries.
Programmatic Email Processing
You can route your emails to Cloudflare Workers to program any logic you want to apply to processing your emails.
Why Use Business Email?
The pain points of not having a professional business email can be summed up in two words: lost opportunities.
A professional email address is an essential part of business branding and often the first impression that potential customers or partners will have of your company.
It can also help establish credibility and trust.
Potential customers could be put off if your email address looks unassociated with your business.
Having custom business email on your website or Internet is a better option than personal or generic email addresses like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.
It also helps you reduce spam, protect your privacy, look professional, avoid data scraping of main email addresses, and more.
Business email means personalized, professional, and custom email addresses on a custom domain.
For example, you can have [email protected] instead of [email protected].
Most of the business email solutions available on the Internet come at a cost.
But what if you don’t pay for one.
That’s where the Cloudflare email routing service is suited to you.
What is Cloudflare’s Email Routing Service?
Cloudflare is a DNS and DDoS protection service that offers a range of services, including domain registration features & email routing.
Cloudflare Email Routing service can be used to create custom email addresses which you can use to forward email messages to any other existing email address like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
No need for complicated web hosting control panels or email hosting setup processes. Just set up a custom email address on CloudFlare, and it will forward all the mail sent to that address to your existing email account.
Prerequisites: Domain Requirements
Before you can start using Cloudflare Email Routing, you need to have your domain inside Cloudflare where Cloudflare allows you to manage your DNS through it. It’s a free service, so in order to create and start using email routing, you need to have your domain inside Cloudflare.
The domain adding process is really easy. Cloudflare is also a good domain registrar, and you can transfer your existing domains to them. They don’t support all extensions, but they do provide great prices since they don’t keep any markup for it.
Once you have transferred or you have your domain inside your Cloudflare, you’re ready to proceed with the email routing setup.
How to Setup Cloudflare Email Routing Service
Step 1: Requesting Email Routing Service
To create a free professional email address with Cloudflare, you need to have a Cloudflare account.
The next step is to open up the domain which you want to set up email routing on. Since it’s a beta solution, it’s still not readily available for public use. You’ll see a “Request Access” button instead of the full email routing interface.
You just need to press the button on all the domains where you want to activate the email routing option. Make sure to request access for every domain you plan to use with email routing.
Step 2: Cloudflare Verification
Cloudflare will need some time to verify your domain and approve your request. This can take up to 48 hours, but you should receive an update on the status of your request within 24 hours. In my experience, it took two days to receive the approved message from Cloudflare.
Once the email routing service has been activated for you, they will send you an email notification. After receiving that approval email, you just need to log back into your Cloudflare dashboard.
Step 3: Creating Custom Email Forwarders
After approval, go back to the email option in your Cloudflare dashboard. Instead of the “Request Access” screen, you’ll now see a “Getting Started” screen where you’ll see options to create a custom email address and also set a destination email address of your choice.
You can use Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or any other email service that doesn’t require additional setup work on a web hosting control panel.
If you need help setting up a Gmail account, we have a tutorial on how to create a new Gmail account from PC.
The next step is to create a custom email address associated with your domain.
Visit Cloudflare Dashboard -> Email Routing from your domain settings section and click on “Add custom name.”
Then you need to enter your existing email address where CloudFlare should send all email messages.
You can fill up the details based on what you want. Once you’ve selected your preferences, click to go to the next step.
Step 4: Verify Destination Email Address
After creating your custom address, it will show a “Pending Verification” status. Cloudflare needs to verify that you actually have access to the destination email address and that you’re not just spamming someone else’s email address.
What you need to do now is go to the email address which you’re trying to connect with Cloudflare. Inside that inbox, you will find an email from Cloudflare requesting you to click a link to verify your email address.
Click on that verification link, and once that is verified, go back to the email routing option in your Cloudflare dashboard.
Step 5: Setup Email MX Records
Now you will see a “Configure your DNS” screen. This means Cloudflare has verified your domain, but now it needs to add email records into your DNS.
MX records mean Mail Exchanger records, and they are the lines or configurations that handle your email sending and receiving for your domain name.
If your domain name does not have any existing MX records, it will simply give you an option to add brand new MX records. However, if there are existing MX records, it will show all the existing MX records because you can’t have two different service providers handling your emails.
Within Cloudflare, you either choose Cloudflare or some third party – you need to make a decision.
You need to replace existing MX records with Cloudflare custom MX records. You can delete existing records from that screen itself.
Critical Note 1: Just remember that in case you delete any existing MX records, as soon as you delete them, you will stop receiving any emails on your domain. So make sure if you are deleting existing MX records, you add the Cloudflare records as soon as possible to make sure that you keep on receiving all those emails.
Once everything is deleted, if you see at the bottom where it says “Missing,” it will simply give you a button which says “Add MX Records Automatically to Cloudflare.” You just need to press this button one time, and it will add all the MX records and TXT records which are relevant or necessary for email routing automatically to your DNS.
Note 2: As soon as you add CloudFlare MX records, email routing and forwarding will happen instantly, and it won’t take time until the next day.
Step 6: Verifying MX Records
Once you have added Custom MX records, the next step is to verify them.
You can obviously verify the DNS records whether that has been done or not by going back into the domain DNS records and verifying it yourself. Once this is done, you have successfully set up that custom email address within Cloudflare.
That’s it. Cloudflare Email Routing service is now configured for your domain.
Step 7: Exploring Email Routing Options
If you go back into the email option for the domain, you can find more options which might be helpful for you. Now you will have access to all Email routing features in Cloudflare.
You can choose which email address the message should be forwarded to and configure various routing rules.
Step 8: Creating More Custom Addresses
It will give you an option to create more custom addresses and set different destination emails for them. As I mentioned, you can create unlimited custom email addresses with this service.
If you want, you can create more custom email addresses from this section and configure each one to forward to different destination email addresses based on your needs.
Step 9: Setup Catch-all Email Address with Drop or Forward Option
You will see all the email address features, such as creating catch-all email addresses. Catch-all email address means any non-existent email boxes or any misconfigured or inaccurate non-existent email addresses that people send emails to on your domain.
You can choose what to do with those emails. Either you can drop those emails (which means just ignore them) or you can set up a custom email address specifically for these catch-all emails and receive emails from these kinds of addresses to that specific email inbox.
Cloudflare also supports the Catch-all email feature with a drop and forward feature.
If a mail is sent to an email address that doesn’t exist, it will be forwarded to a default email address you set or dropped.
Step 10: Managing Destination Addresses
You can also see the current DNS records and status on that screen. Additionally, you will be able to see all the destination email addresses you have added, with options showing whether they’re verified and active.
You can also manage your destination email address from this section. It will give you the option to add more destinations and also provide an option to remove any unwanted destinations.
Just click on the name of a configured address and delete it if you don’t need it anymore.
And add another email address you want.
Current Beta Status and Limitations
It’s still in beta, so I’m creating this early-stage video, but I’m not sure how it will be progressing. However, so far it is a really good way to collect emails and forward those to your personal email addresses.
Remember that this is currently a forwarding-only service – you can receive emails through your professional address, but when you reply, it will come from your personal email address that you’ve set as the destination.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learned how to get a free professional email address from Cloudflare, routed through the free Cloudflare email routing service.
It is perfect for people who want to use an email address like “[email protected]” and forward all emails to another address like “[email protected]”.
With this free professional forwarding email address, you can use any email service you prefer to send and receive email messages.
So far, it is a really good way to collect emails and forward those to your personal email addresses, making it an excellent solution for businesses and individuals who want professional email addresses without the cost.
If you want to use Cloudflare’s email routing service, visit Cloudflare here.
I hope this video and guide was useful. If you have any other questions or problems, feel free to leave me a comment and I will get back to you.