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Registered domains

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Email forwarding

Hosting your own email is a pain in the arse, especially if you're expecting minimal volume of legit email. Much easier to just use your real account for everything.

But aliases are nice to have, and sometimes needed for stuff like SSL certs to prove ownership of the domain. So we need those addresses to work.

So far I've been using ForwardEmail.net and it's quite nice. You put in some DNS TXT entries, and set them as your MX, and they handle the forwarding.

Something I've just learnt about is that Cloudflare plans to offer a similar service soon (as of November 2021). Given that I'm already using cloudflare for those domains, getting them to handle the email forwarding would be nice. I'll sign up for that when it becomes available.

Cloudflare forwarding

My beta invite arrived! Let's see what we need to do.

Right now I'm using Forwardemail for three domains that are already with Cloudflare, let's flip them to Cloudflare Email.

• Current: all emails go to personal account
• New: admin@ and hostmaster@ go to personal email, all others get dropped

The DNS records need fixing up too of course.

• Delete:

  MX      tallgirls.info  1       mx2.forwardemail.net
  MX      tallgirls.info  0       mx1.forwardemail.net
  TXT     tallgirls.info          v=spf1 a mx include:spf.forwardemail.net -all

• Add

  MX      tallgirls.info  14      isaac.mx.cloudflare.net 
  MX      tallgirls.info  4       linda.mx.cloudflare.net 
  MX      tallgirls.info  60      amir.mx.cloudflare.net  
  TXT     tallgirls.info          v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net ~all      

Actually once you've deleted the bad records, there's a button you can click that does the rest. Delete the TXT records containing Forwardemail routing rules, and you're done, go test them.

A quick test shows that it works a charm. According to the sender info:

     from:  Barney Desmond <barney@work.com>
       to:  aliasname@shortgirls.net
     date:  15 Jan 2022, 03:21
  subject:  Just trying out this new Cloudflare email thing
mailed-by:  shortgirls.net
Signed by:  work.com
 security:  Standard encryption (TLS) Learn more