# Cloudflare Email Routing and Sending
[[Cloudflare]] provides two related email primitives bundled into one product family. Since April 16, 2026, the family has a name: **Cloudflare Email Service**.
**Email Routing** is a free inbound-only service: receive mail at `
[email protected]`, route it to any external address (Gmail, Fastmail, etc.) or to a [[Cloudflare Workers]] handler. It replaces the use case for self-hosted mail forwarders and services like ImprovMX. DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are auto-configured.
**Email Sending** (public beta since April 16, 2026, Workers Paid plan only) is an outbound transactional sending API exposed as a Workers binding (`env.EMAIL.send()`), a REST API and, since June 2026, authenticated SMTP submission (beta). It competes with Resend, Postmark, and SendGrid for transactional email, but with the Cloudflare-native binding model — no API key juggling, no separate SDK.
## Why It Matters
Custom-domain forwarding used to mean either self-hosting Postfix (operationally hideous) or paying ImprovMX/ForwardEmail/etc. Cloudflare Email Routing is free, native to the DNS zone, and integrates with Workers — receive an email, parse it in a Worker, store in [[Cloudflare D1]] or [[Cloudflare R2]], route to a webhook, etc.
Email Sending closes the loop: an Agents-SDK or Workers app can now receive and send mail without leaving the platform. [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]] agents get a native `onEmail` hook for exactly that.
## Pricing
- **Email Routing (inbound)**: unlimited and free on every plan
- **Email Sending (outbound)**: 3,000 emails per month included with Workers Paid, then $0.35 per 1,000. Not available on Workers Free
- Sending to verified destination addresses in your own account is free on all plans and doesn't count toward the quota
- Email Workers are billed as regular [[Cloudflare Workers]] usage
- 2026 extras: sending events delivered to [[Cloudflare Queues]] (July), Email Routing rules managed from [[Wrangler]] (September)
## Common Use Cases
- **Catch-all forwarding** for personal domains
- **Workers email handlers** — auto-respond, parse, store, classify, dispatch
- **Transactional email** from Workers/Agents without a third-party API
- **Newsletter ingest** — receive newsletters at an alias, process via [[Cloudflare Workers AI]]
- **AI-agent inboxes** — agents that receive email as a tool input
## References
- Email Routing: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/email-routing/
- Email Service docs (the old /email-routing/ docs redirect here): https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/
- Email Sending with the Workers API: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/api/send-emails/workers-api/
- Pricing: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/platform/pricing/
- Changelog, Email Sending public beta (2026-04-16): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-04-16-email-sending-public-beta/
- Changelog, authenticated SMTP submission (2026-06-08): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-06-08-smtp-submission/
- Changelog, Email Sending events with Queues (2026-07-15): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-15-event-subscriptions/
- Changelog, Email Routing rules with Wrangler (2026-09-04): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-09-04-email-routing-rules-wrangler/
## Related
- [[Proton Mail]]
- [[Cloudflare]]
- [[Cloudflare Workers]]
- [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]]
- [[Cloudflare D1]]
- [[Cloudflare R2]]
- [[Cloudflare Queues]]
- [[Wrangler]]