Email Setup: Part 1 — Forwarding through Cloudflare

An address on your own domain, for example info@example.ru, looks more professional than a Gmail or Mail.ru inbox and inspires more trust from clients. The simplest and free way to get such an address is to forward mail through Cloudflare.

What is forwarding

Forwarding is the automatic sending of incoming messages from one address to another. For example, messages sent to info@example.ru are delivered directly to your personal inbox on Gmail or Yandex.Mail.

For a small business starting out, this is convenient for several reasons:

1. Professional appearance. Clients see the company’s address, not a personal inbox.
2. Cost saving. No need to pay for mail hosting or a corporate plan.
3. Convenience. All correspondence arrives in your usual inbox, where filters and calendar are already set up.
4. Flexibility. You can create multiple addresses for different tasks (sales@, support@, ceo@) and forward them to one or several inboxes.

How Email Routing works

Cloudflare Email Routing is free and available for domains whose DNS records are managed by Cloudflare. When enabled, Cloudflare automatically adds the necessary MX records and an SPF record to the domain’s zone, so you don’t need to set up a mail server or manually create DNS records. Then you specify which mailbox to forward mail to for each address and confirm that mailbox using the link in Cloudflare’s email.

Limitations to consider:

• Incoming mail only. Email Routing accepts and forwards messages, but does not send them on behalf of your domain. If you reply to a forwarded message from your personal inbox, the recipient will see your personal address. To send from the domain address you need a separate service with an SMTP server.
• Limits. You can create up to 200 forwarding rules per domain and up to 200 destination addresses per account. Messages larger than 25 MB are rejected.

Required skills and difficulty

• Skills. Basic understanding of DNS records and the ability to work in the Cloudflare dashboard.
• Difficulty — low. If the domain is already managed in Cloudflare, forwarding can be set up in a few minutes.

Forwarding through Cloudflare lets you immediately receive mail at a custom domain address for free, and postpone choosing a full-featured mail service until you actually need it.