# Cloudflare Email Routing and Sending
[[Cloudflare]] provides two related email primitives bundled into one product family.
**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** (newer, paired with the Agents/Workers platform) is an outbound transactional sending API exposed as a Workers binding. 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.
## 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/
- Routing docs: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/
- Email Sending docs: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/email-workers/send/
## Related
- [[Cloudflare]]
- [[Cloudflare Workers]]
- [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]]
- [[Cloudflare D1]]
- [[Cloudflare R2]]