During Cloudflare’s recent Birthday Week, the company announced the private preview of its Cloudflare Email Service. This new globally managed service enables developers to send and receive emails directly from Workers using native bindings, without the need for API keys.
The managed Email Service will allow developers to send transactional emails directly from Workers, automatically configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for improved deliverability, and route and parse incoming emails using Workers AI. Thomas Gauvin, product manager at Cloudflare, and Celso Martinho, senior director of engineering at Cloudflare, write:
We’re focusing on deliverability and time-to-inbox with Cloudflare Email Service (…) We’re tightly integrating with DNS to automatically configure the necessary DNS records — like SPF, DKIM and DMARC — such that email providers can verify your sending domain and trust your emails.
According to the documentation, developers will be able to use Workers to process incoming mail, store attachments in R2, the S3-compatible object storage, or add tasks to Cloudflare Queues. To simplify testing, developers can use Wrangler to emulate the email sending locally.
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
await env.SEND_EMAIL.send({
to: [{ email: "[email protected]" }],
from: { email: "[email protected]", name: "Your App" },
subject: "Hello World",
text: "Hello World!"
});
return new Response(`Successfully sent email!`);
},
};
Source: Cloudflare blog
In popular Hacker News threads, developers have welcomed the announcement, focusing either on the differences from competing services like Amazon SES and SendGrid or on how Cloudflare is evolving into a full-featured cloud platform. While Amazon SES is a similar service from AWS, available in multiple regions, Cloudflare has simplified the experience by offering a single global endpoint, as it does with many other managed services. Gauvin and Martinho add:
In true Cloudflare fashion, Email Service is a global service. That means that we can deliver your emails with low latency anywhere in the world, without the complexity of managing servers across regions.
The announcement is not the first time the web infrastructure and security company has introduced a mail-related product. In 2021, Cloudflare launched an Email Routing service that focuses on forwarding inbound emails. Jamie Lord, solution architect at CDS UK, comments on the latest announcement:
Cloudflare just solved one of development’s most persistent headaches (…) Cloudflare’s approach cuts through this complexity entirely (…) The combination with Email Routing creates something powerful. Inbound emails can trigger Workers that process content, whilst outbound emails close the loop – turning email from a necessary burden into a genuine application component.
The new service supports both REST APIs and SMTP, including compatibility with existing email frameworks like React Email, which simplifies sending HTML-rendered emails to users. Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of competing service Resend, tweets:
Email is not a winner-takes-all kind of market, and that’s why we’ve been able to enter such a competitive space and still thrive. Competition is good because it forces the best product to win.
The private beta of Email Service was just one of the announcements during Birthday Week 2025. Among other announcements celebrating their 15 years, Cloudflare introduced a Data Platform to ingest, store, and query analytical data tables using open standards like Apache Iceberg, as well as Observatory and Smart Shield, monitoring tools in the Cloudflare dashboard that provide actionable recommendations and one-click fixes for performance issues.
The beta for Cloudflare Email Service is scheduled to launch in November and will require a paid Workers subscription, with message-based pricing still being finalized.
