Have you ever wanted to try a new email service but worried it might lead to you missing any emails? If you have, you’re definitely not alone. Some of us email ourselves to make sure it reaches the correct destination, others don’t rely on a new address for anything serious until they’ve seen it work for a few days. In any case, emails often contain important information, and we need to trust that our emails won’t get lost for any reason.

To help reduce these worries about whether emails are being received and forwarded - and for troubleshooting if needed - we are rolling out a new Overview page to Email Routing. On the Overview tab people now have full visibility into our service and can see exactly how we are routing emails on their behalf.

The first thing you will see in the new tab is an at a glance view of the service. This includes the routing status (to know if the service is configured and running), whether the necessary DNS records are configured correctly, and the number of custom and destination addresses on the zone.

Below the configuration summary, you will see more advanced statistics about the number of messages received on your custom addresses, and what happened to those messages. You will see information about the number of emails forwarded or dropped by Email Routing (based on the rules you created), and the number that fall under other scenarios such as being rejected by Email Routing (due to errors, not passing security checks or being considered spam) or rejected by your destination mailbox. You now have the exact counts and a chart, so that you can track these metrics over time.

On the Cloudflare Email Routing tab you'll also see the Activity Log, where you can drill deeper into specific behaviors. These logs show you details about the email messages that reached one of the custom addresses you have configured on your Cloudflare zone.

For each message the logs will show you the Message ID, Sender, Custom Address, when Cloudflare Email Routing received it, and the action that was taken. You can also expand the row to see the SPF, DMARC, and DKIM status of that message along with any relevant error messaging.

And we know looking at every message can be overwhelming, especially when you might be resorting to the logs for troubleshooting purposes, so you have a few options for filtering:

• Search for specific people (email addresses) that have messaged you.

• Filter to show only one of your custom addresses.

• Filter to show only messages where a specific action was taken.

Next to the Overview tab, you will find the Routes tab with the configuration UI that is likely already familiar to you. That’s where you create custom addresses, add and verify destination addresses, and create rules with the relationships between the custom and destination addresses.

Lastly the Settings tab includes less common actions such as the DNS configuration and the options for off boarding from Email Routing.

We expect Email Routing Insights to be available to everyone by Monday May 2nd. We hope you enjoy this update. And if you have any questions or feedback about this product, please come see us in the Cloudflare Community and the Cloudflare Discord.

Note: Cloudflare Email Routing is now in open Beta, available to everyone. You no longer need to join a waitlist to use it.

Over four billion people — or half of the world’s population — have at least one email address, many of whom use it as an essential tool to stay on top of their personal and professional matters. More than 300 billion emails are sent and received every day, but seeing email as just a communications tool wouldn’t do it justice. Its impact in our lives goes far beyond being a vessel for messages — its use cases also cover being a common way of validating one’s identity online, and serving as the gateway for other communication platforms.

Today, most people use their email for sensitive purposes, such as logging in to their bank account, or communicating with governmental entities. At the same time, they will use that email to sign up for a 10% off coupon they found online, which will surely spam them for months to come. Despite these two use cases being polar opposites in relation to importance and security, people take the risk, usually for the sake of conveniently managing one account.

Much in the same way, businesses want to have different email addresses for different types of inquiries, such as sales and support, but often find it cumbersome to control who receives these emails. And as the business evolves, matters that were handled by the owner often need to be handed off to other people. But for small businesses it’s not usually straightforward to configure mailboxes and aliases.

And then there are countless individuals and families that juggle multiple mailboxes to handle the Internet identities that they use, to represent their various online presences.

We understand these challenges, and that’s why we’re launching Cloudflare Email Routing, the most straightforward way to create any number of email addresses that are redirected to the mailbox you, your family or your team are already using.

Cloudflare Email Routing is designed to simplify the way you create and manage email addresses, without needing to keep an eye on additional mailboxes.

The process is simple:

1. You enter the email address you want to create on your domain

2. You enter the email address you want it forwarded to

As some of you already know, email consists of the envelope, the header, and its body.

The envelope is part of the SMTP transport protocol and tells the servers where the email is coming from and where it's supposed to be delivered.

The headers contain structured information like the message traveled path, date, the sender and recipients' addresses, subject, and other technical metadata like SPF pass results, DKIM signatures, and anti-spam scores. Every time the message goes through a server, it can add new headers or modify the existing ones until it reaches the final inbox.

And finally, there's the body of the message, where the actual content resides. The body can be plain text, rich HTML, it can contain file attachments, and in some cases, it can be signed or even encrypted.

Here’s a simplified diagram of how the SMTP protocol works and how the three steps of an Email message fit together:

Cloudflare Email Routing service acts as an intelligent router at the transport layer, handling and modifying the SMTP envelope to deliver the message at its final destination but preserving the original headers and keeping the body intact. This approach ensures that things like SPF, DKIM, and other security or anti-spam protocols don't break and the recipient stays protected.

Furthermore, following the same privacy-first approach we use in other products, we don't look into, queue, or store emails at any point. Messages are received, handled according to the configured rules, and delivered to their final destinations in real-time.

Email Forwarding is now in private beta, and you can save your place in line through this sign-up form.

Then, to start using Email Routing, all you need to do is to add your domain to Cloudflare DNS.

If you don’t currently own a domain, you can buy one right here on our registrar.

Then there are only a few steps to creating a new email address and setting up forwarding:

1. Go to the email page on the Cloudflare dashboard.

2. Select Configure.

3. Enter the email address you want to create (remember, this is for your domain, so you can pick anything you like). Alternatively, you can choose to use a catch-all so that all possible emails addresses in your domain are considered valid and forwarded.

4. The DNS configuration step is automatic if you don’t have email configured for your domain. Otherwise, we provide straightforward guidance on how to best configure it for your needs.

5. Lastly, you just need to validate that the destination email belongs to you. Super simple, and exactly the same as you’ve done a million times before.

We did say we made it straightforward!

With efficiency and simplicity in mind, we're launching Email Routing with support for multiple rules and message forwarding to any upstream inbox of your choice.

However, we feel like the email scene has been long-dormant, and we have exciting new features coming soon that take advantage of the Cloudflare platform, resources, and know-how.

We're also listening. If you have questions, suggestions, or new ideas, share them in the community forum. We'll be around.

To start using Cloudflare Email Routing just join the waitlist today through this form. We will be opening up this service to more users on a daily basis, and promise the short wait will be worth it!

If you want to read more, refer to our documentation.