Website: Secure, Accelerate, and Custom Email

Making your site have that enterprise-like clout requires what some would think of as premium features like a custom email domain (ex. [email protected]). Setting up this feature takes a little extra work, but it’s super easy, integrates into Gmail or Outlook, and works like a charm. New features and expanding support from multiple vendors have made this a regular feature for regular users.

To utilize this free private email forwarding service, navigate to your Cloudflare account. Login to the domain you want to manage and select email from the sidebar menu. This is free for everyone and will handle all your inbound emails to this customer domain address. Click the get started button.

On the next screen, you can input the custom email you want to add (ex. info@ or support@ or [email protected], etc..). Enter your desired custom address and send to destination, like your Gmail, Outlook, or other provider email address. Then click the create and continue button. I will be using Gmail.

Cloudflare will send you a verification email; you will need to follow the instructions on that email and validate your account.

Now you will need to configure your Cloudflare DNS records to tell them how to handle your inbound emails to your custom address. This is not a difficult task; Cloudflare provides step-by-step instructions on what type of records to delete and what kind to add.

Once you add the required DNS records or delete them, you can click the button that says finish. You will get a confirmation screen, and you can test out your new email connection (for receiving). You can receive unlimited incoming emails through this setup at no cost.

Now it’s time to set up outgoing email. With confirmation that you can receive email from your custom email domain, how about sending! We can do that too! However, we won’t be doing this through Cloudflare but through another vendor’s free tier service. This will be done through Sendinblue.

Why SendinBlue? Because it gives us 300 free outgoing emails a day! And if we get super busy, we can upgrade easily from the free tier to an affordable email plan, and by the time we send out 300 emails a day, it should be worth the upgrade!

Using your favorite web browser, navigate to sendinblue.com. In the upper right corner of the website, you should see a sign-up free button; click that. This will take you to a sign-up form where you must validate your email address and enter personal information about yourself and your site. Complete this action, and the site will ask you to pick a plan. Select the free tier.

Now navigate to your account drop-down list and select the Senders and IP menu item. Here you will add the name you would like it to come from (Support, your name, etc.) and enter the email address you set up for your domain as the sending from location. Save your input, and sendinblue will send you an email verification to “activate your sender address.” Follow the instructions to validate the request, and it should show your new address as verified.

Now we want to add your domain. Click the domain tab and add your domain name and check the box that says you would like to use the domain name to digitally sign emails. After adding your domain, sendinblue will pop a screen asking you to authorize the domain. It provides the records you must add to Cloudflare to allow email sending. Pay close attention to the record hostname that you will be adding. Copy-paste the necessary data from each block record (see note below regarding the TXT SPF record) into Cloudflare and click the “record added please verify it” button to ensure it was input correctly.

Please NOTE that you will be editing the SPF record already in place on the Cloudflare DNS site when adding the TXT record for the SPF record. Your SPF record should look like the included pictured below.

See, that was easy! We need to integrate this with Gmail so you can send and receive it from your Gmail account. Log into your Gmail account and go to “see all settings.” Under the accounts and imports tab, go to the “send email as” section. Click the add another email link. input your information (same as you did at sendinblue), and uncheck the box that says “treat as an alias.” another window will pop up asking for server information. After creating a new SMTP key, you will find this information under SMTP & API in your Sendinblue account. Use the new password provided and add that to the Gmail setup screen. Like an API Key, the new SMTP password is only shown once, so save it somewhere. If you need it and close the window without copying, you must deactivate your created key and create a new SMTP key. This is not a big deal and a quick step, but saving the key is much better than repeatedly creating a new one every time you need it.

Now attempt to send an email. You should be able to compose an email and in the “from” section of your email, drop down to see available sending from options and select your custom email account. Write a test message and send it. It may take a minute to receive your first email, but you are probably good to go if you don’t get an error. In your all settings screen in Gmail, validate under accounts and imports, then your “send email as” section has the radial button “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” checked. This will ensure when you respond to an email, it comes from the account that received the message.

Most people like setting up an email address for their domain to communicate with new subscribers and send out newsletters or post notifications. This is what sendinblue was made for, email campaigns. If you’re using WordPress, add the sendinblue plugin and create your templates and automation. This setup is easy but is definitely a topic for another post. I found the process straightforward, but I will also put together a quick how-to on this if requested