Cloudflare Email Routing: domain email without hosting

You print business cards, launch your website and give a client your personal Gmail address, because creating one with your domain seemed to mean paying for hosting. The client hesitates: is this company serious?

If your domain is already on Cloudflare, you can have professional addresses without paying for a mail server.

What is Cloudflare Email Routing?

It is a service that receives the emails sent to your domain and forwards them to the inboxes you already use. According to Cloudflare's documentation, it processes incoming email with Workers or forwards it to destination addresses. It is not a new mailbox: it is a smart redirect to your Gmail, Outlook or whichever email you prefer.

How much does it cost?

Forwarding to your own verified addresses costs nothing. Cloudflare states in its documentation that sending to verified destination addresses in your account is free on the Workers Free and Paid plans, even when you only use Email Routing. To see what else the account includes at no cost, check what the free Cloudflare plan includes.

How is it turned on, step by step?

You enable it from the Cloudflare dashboard in four steps. According to the activation guide:

1. Go to Email Routing in the dashboard and choose “Onboard Domain”.
2. Select the domain in your account and, if you want, review the DNS records that will be added.
3. Confirm with “Done”.
4. Add your destination address and verify it with the link you receive by email.

DNS changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate, although Cloudflare says that on domains using its DNS they usually take between 5 and 15 minutes.

Heads up: Email Routing requires the domain to use Cloudflare DNS, and when you enable it, it adds MX records. If you currently receive email with another provider, check your MX records before continuing or you will stop receiving in that mailbox. If you are not sure whether that is your case, book a consultation before touching anything.

Which DNS records does it create?

It creates three types of records on your root domain.

Record	What it is for
MX	Directs incoming email to Cloudflare
TXT (SPF)	Authorizes the routing
TXT (DKIM)	Authenticates forwarded emails

If you want to understand why SPF and DKIM matter, we explain it in SPF, DKIM and DMARC: keep your emails out of spam.

How do rules and the catch-all work?

Each rule pairs an address pattern with a destination, and the catch-all collects whatever matches no rule. According to the addresses documentation, the destination can be a verified email or a Worker, and there is also a “Drop” action, which discards the message. Until you verify the destination, the rule stays disabled.

The catch-all forwards everything sent to your domain to a single destination, including mistyped addresses. An address with a subaddress, such as “name+detail”, is resolved by the base address rule, unless a specific rule exists.

What are its limits and what does it not do?

Its limits are generous for a small business, and it is not for sending email. The limits page lists 200 rules per domain, 200 destination addresses per account (shared across domains) and 25 MiB per incoming message; larger messages are rejected.

To send as your domain, Cloudflare offers a separate product, Email Sending, which according to its documentation is in beta and requires the Workers Paid plan. Meanwhile, if your website lives on Cloudflare, 301 redirects with the _redirects file also help you keep the rest in order.

In short

Your client should not have to write to a personal Gmail address: with Email Routing you receive, in your usual inbox, whatever arrives at your domain's addresses, without paying to forward. Before enabling it, confirm your current MX records and remember that it only receives. If you want us to get it running together with your website and your DNS, see our hosting and domains service.