FranklyMail vs Cloudflare Email Routing

Email Routing takes a message sent to you@yourdomain.com and drops it into an inbox you already own. Nothing is stored on Cloudflare’s side. There is no account to log into, no folder structure, no archive. The mail lands wherever you pointed it, and that inbox is the real one.

For a lot of people that is exactly right. One person, one domain, a handful of aliases for shops and newsletters, all landing in a personal Gmail. Free, five minutes, done. We would rather tell you that than sell you a mailbox you do not need.

It stops being right the moment there is a second person. There is nobody to forward to, because your co-founder does not have an inbox on your domain; they have your forwarding rule, or nothing.

This page used to be simpler: Cloudflare forwarded and could not send, so replying from your own domain meant finding an SMTP provider anyway. That is now out of date. Cloudflare will send outbound mail through a REST API, a Workers binding or SMTP.

But look at what that is for. It is transactional sending from an application: password resets, receipts, webhooks. It is infrastructure with an API key, not an account your phone’s Mail app can log into. There is still no inbox behind it, so there is still nothing to reply from in the ordinary sense of the word.

And that is where the two products stop overlapping. We deliberately do not do bulk or transactional sending (no newsletters, no application mail) because taking that traffic is how sending IPs get dirty and how one-to-one mail starts landing in spam folders. If you need an app to send ten thousand receipts, use Cloudflare, or a sender built for it. If you need five people to have real addresses, that is us.

This is not a choice between two vendors. Cloudflare is where a lot of our customers’ DNS already lives, and that is a perfectly good place for it to stay.

You keep the domain on Cloudflare, turn Email Routing off for it, and point the MX record at us instead, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC alongside. Our setup guide has the Cloudflare-specific version of those four records, including the fields their dashboard names differently.

You lose nothing on the Cloudflare side except the forwarding rules, which is the point: the addresses stop being redirects and start being mailboxes.