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Setup Free Email for Your Own Domain with Cloudflare and Mailjet

Technology Cloudflare Mailjet Tags
| February 13, 2024 | 4 min to read

Intro

Owning your own domain is one thing. Setting up email on your own domain is another.
In this guide, we set up a free email service for our own domain. It uses the free tier of both providers, so sending and receiving email costs nothing.

Note: I will use my email me@franzramadhan.dev as an example in this post.

Prerequisites

Prepare these things first:

  • A domain and DNS zone that Cloudflare manages, and an account with access to Cloudflare Email Routing
  • Mailjet account
  • A public email account for sending and receiving email, for example Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook.
    • Some mail providers do not show messages that come from the same address. So you can need a different address for sending and for receiving. This matters most during the verification process.

Setup

These steps set up both receiving and sending mail for an address in your own domain.

Cloudflare Email Routing for Email Receiving

  • Route email sent to your domain to your free email provider, for example Gmail, Live, or iCloud. Follow this Cloudflare Email Routing doc. Verify the address from the inbox of your free email provider.

  • In the email security records, set the TXT record for DMARC in your domain. DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails the checks. You can usually find it under this URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/<account-id>>/<website-name>/email/dmarc-management/dns. Replace the <account-id>>/<website-name> with your own.

  • Create a new DNS TXT record for SPF. SPF lists the servers that can send mail for your domain. This record lets Mailjet send email on behalf of your domain.

    "v=spf1 include:spf.mailjet.com include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net ~all"

  • Send an email to your address to make sure that receiving works. In my case the source address is franzramadhan@icloud.com. The destination address is me@franzramadhan.dev, which forwards to my personal Gmail account.

    receive email from cloudflare email routing

MailJet as SMTP Relay for Email Sending

  • Validate your domain so you can legitimately send email from its addresses. Follow this guide.

  • For the validation method, use DNS validation. It requires a DNS TXT record in your zone.

  • Also set a DNS TXT record for DKIM. DKIM signs outgoing mail so receivers can verify the sender. Get the required values from Mailjet. You can usually find them at https://app.mailjet.com/account/sender?type=auth.

  • After you set it, you get a status like this.

    mailjet dkim and spf status

  • Generate the SMTP relay configuration and credential at https://app.mailjet.com/account/relay. Save the Secret Key in a safe place, for example a secret manager. Mailjet shows it only once.

    mailjet smtp config

  • In Gmail, you can send from an alternate address with a custom credential. Go to account settings https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/accounts -> Send mail as -> Click Add another email address.

  • In the name and email fields, fill in your name and the email address for the alternate sending address. Make sure that the Treat as an alias box is clear.

    gmail set alternate sending address

  • In the Send mail through your SMTP server step, set SMTP Server to in-v3.mailjet.com and Port to 587. Set Username to MailJet API Key and Password to Mailjet Secret Key. Always use the recommended setting, TLS over SSL. Save the changes when you finish.

    gmail set smtp relay credential

  • When it is done, send a test email from your own address. In this example I sent email from me@franzramadhan.dev to franzramadhan@icloud.com.

    email sent from gmail using alternate address
    complete header for received email

  • As the picture below shows, the sent mail also passed SPF, DMARC, and DKIM validation. So receivers mark our address as legitimate. Messages from our own address have less chance to land in spam.

    spf,dmarc,and dkim validation status

Outro

With the setup above, you now have email on your own domain with Cloudflare Email Routing and Mailjet. Mailjet gives you up to 200 free emails per day, with up to 100 alternate addresses. Cloudflare Email Routing gives you 200 routing rules and addresses for receiving email. I hope this is useful for you.

References