Cloudflare has announced that the email routing feature that was available for select users is now available for free to everyone.
Cloudflare Email Routing
Cloudflare Email Routing is a feature that makes it possible to set up automatic email forwarding for free. What this means is that you can create domain email address X on Cloudflare and select another existing email address Y where emails sent to X will be forwarded to.
In a simple definition, Cloudflare Email Routing is Automatic Email forwarding.
Some of the restrictions of using Cloudflare email routing include.
- Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are not supported
- subdomains are currently only supported for enterprise clients.
Benefits of using Cloudflare email routing
The benefit of using Cloudflare email routing over email forwarding services offered for free by most web hosting companies is that Cloudflare provides advanced protection and privacy. It also removes the technicalities that are involved in the configuration of email forwarding.
How to setup Cloudflare Email Routing
To configure Cloudflare email routing, make sure that you have added your domain to Cloudflare and then follow the steps below
- Go to your dashboard
- Click Email
- Then click Configure Email Routing
- Create your custom domain email address for example: john@example.com
- Add the email where you want emails to be forwarded to (you will be sent an email verification mail)
- Then click save
- The status should be active.
- Then click add records automatically so that your MX and TX records can be configured. You can also choose to manually add your DNS records.
- After adding DNS records, you should see ‘Forwarding enabled‘
- You are done
You can always delete email forwarding anytime.
Email verification delivery issues
You will receive a verification email to confirm that the destination email belongs to you. If you have not received the email, check your spam folder. Most users have reported that the verification email ended up in the spam folder. If it is not in the spam folder, then use another email to find out whether the problem is with the first email.
If the second email receives the verification mail and the first did not, then it might be that your first email address has been added to the suppression list, therefore emails can’t be delivered to it. Also, make sure that all your MX records are properly configured.
Read more about Cloudflare’s email routing feature.
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John Ali says
CF will not route php mailer. I use NameCheap as my webhost and so I use their php mail in WordPress and Joomla but neither of them are able to process messages via Contact form because CF is not routing php mail. However, if I change the settings and use SMTP from gmail, or outlook then it works.
CF don’t have a solution for this yet and because of php mail security they are not going to work on this.