All I wanted was a custom domain email
A software developer shares their experience attempting to set up a custom domain email address using Cloudflare and various open-source tools. The author details the technical challenges of balancing cost, complexity, and reliability in email routing and delivery.
Why it matters
It highlights the ongoing technical hurdles for individual users seeking professional digital infrastructure without relying on expensive enterprise services.
At this point, I have owned the domain jacobg.co for over 2 years. For the longest time, I have been trying to have a custom email address at my domain without paying a fortune for a service that isn’t widely used. Here are some of the things I was looking for:
I tried a few different solutions, from Cloudflare’s built-in email routing to completely self-hosted options. In this post, I’ll go over what I tried, what didn’t work, and what I’ve finally settled on.
This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the DNS records for this domain are routed through Cloudflare. Naturally, my first instinct was to use Cloudflare’s own solution for custom domain email: Email Routing.
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