Has anyone tested Cloudflare's new SMTP sending?

[eric990]

Just curious if anyone has used Cloudflare's SMTP sending for XenForo's transactional emails? It's a new service but I'd love to hear anyone's experiences with deliverability, bounces, etc.

If I understand correctly, 3k emails per month are included with the $5 Workers Paid plan, then you pay $0.35/1,000.

 

[Chris D]

We're pretty happy with it so far



Deliverability is fine, bounces below 2% (sort of typical). There were some typical Microsoft block list issues last week that were resolved quickly (by Cloudflare, not me!).

The tricky thing for people will be configuring bounce feedback. You have to set up a queue, subscription to the queue, a consumer of the queue and then a worker to process the queue and then we have it forwarding them to a custom webhook endpoint.

The other thing you have to be careful of is you get a very small daily quota to start with. Increasing that is either a Google Form (which they may not action immediately) or trying to flag down a member of staff on the official Cloudflare Discord. We did the latter and got it actioned very quickly, but others haven't seen as much success so don't plan to switch over until you have the increased quota sorted.

 

[eDaddi]

No experience with CF, but for knowledge sharing ... Amazon SES is $.17/1k emails up to 10M, then $.14/1K over that. Simple set up and great deliverability.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I use CF smtp on a bunch of websites hosted in workers, contact forms, etc. Works really well. I also use SES, which I believe is the gold standard in email sending, better than Exchange.

 

[smallwheels]

better than Exchange

Basically anything is better than Exchange, including pigeons. In former days there was even a sticker "exchange Exchange" that gained some popularity within the sysadmin guild. Exchange has been a typically horrible Microsoft product from the start: A black box, hard to backup and impossible to restore, ignoring any established standards, resource hungry like nothing else, expensive, incompatible to anything but Outlook, slow, full of security holes - in short: A total nightmare in every perspective possible.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

incompatible to anything but Outlook

Yup... BUT... its pretty much incompatible to even outlook nowadays. Outlook is near rendered useless with anything beyond a handful of small accounts. When you throw 50G+ accounts at it with TB's of online archive, even in online mode, it just freezes and crashes. Horrible. I have tried pushing and kicking my wife to get away from it, but she complains about it daily and continues to use it.

 

[smallwheels]

she complains about it daily and continues to use it

Well, very much like some of the people here on the forum talk about XenForo as a product and as a company.