Registered domains

Domain	Expiry	Cost in AUD	Cost native	Notes
765.agency	May 12th	23 AUD	16 USD	Cloudflare
meidokon.net	Jun 6th	26 AUD	-	Gandi
shortgirls.net	Jul 10th	13 AUD	10 USD	Cloudflare
thighhighs.top	Oct 24th	14 AUD	-	Gandi
tallgirls.info	Jun 5th	17 AUD	13 USD	Cloudflare, expired 2022-06-05

Remember that renewal billing happens one month before the expiry date!

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