Possibility of using email routing while email hosted elsewhere?
Hi folks, i had domain and email hosted at porkbun, and moved the DNS to CF.
As for the email hosting, porkbun had a guide (basically we just need to move our MX and TXT records to CF) and now everything is working well.
But now i want to use CF's email routing feature and for that I would need to add a new email, but when enabling it, I see a conflict message. Does it mean I can't use email routing in CF with email hosting purchased outside CF?
7 Replies
Does it mean I can't use email routing in CF with email hosting purchased outside CF? ImageHow MX records work is that it finds the one with the lowest priority and sends mail to that. You can't have two different services MX records for your apex, as only one would get the mail
Oh TIL💡
So if that is the case, can i delete the existing existing MX and TXT records from CF and then use CF's email routing service to route to porkbun hosted email addresses?
depends what you mean by that. Porkbun gives you just normal custom domain email like custom@domain.com? You wouldn't be able to route to that because the MX records on domain.com would be pointing to CF instead of porkbun, so you'd just be infinite looping
yes, i purchased few email hosting that looks like
email@yourdomain.com
ideally, using cloudflare to host websites, where should i host email then? i didn't find a hosting service from cf.where should i host email then?Up to you entirely. I wouldn't recommend Email Forwarding for anything you care about anyway, the Email Forwarding product itself is fine, just email forwarding has a pretty decent chance of being caught in spam filters/etc these days, if you don't fully control the destination inbox. I love fastmail. I know some people like ProtonMail. A free alternative for one domain is ZohoMail
To add to my above reply: I use porkbun gui for managing emails apart from the porkbun hsoting, so it functions like fastmail/protonmail, etc
but does these services like fastmail, zoho, etc requires setting up MX and TXT records in cloudflare? if then, what if i want to use
resend or email workers which requires adding MX and TXT records?
my primary use case is as follows: (related thread https://discord.com/channels/595317990191398933/1261366932238766101)
(1) submit form -> (2) store the form data to d2 -> (3) send an email with the form data to myself.
for the step 3, i have seen 2 ways to do this
1. use email workers https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/email-workers/send-email-workers/
2. using resend https://developers.cloudflare.com/developer-spotlight/tutorials/handle-form-submission-with-astro-resend/
while the first one requires altering existing email records, second method adds a new email records.Cloudflare Docs
Send emails from Workers · Cloudflare Email Routing docs
You can send an email about your Worker’s activity from your Worker to an email address verified on Email Routing. This is useful for when you want to …
Cloudflare Docs
Send form submissions using Astro and Resend · Cloudflare Developer...
This tutorial will instruct you on how to send emails from Astro and Cloudflare Workers (via Cloudflare SSR Adapter) using Resend .
sending mail doesn't require mx records, just TXT modifications (SPF/DKIM) to authorize them as senders