Add cloudflare emails post

content/posts/cloudflare-mailchannel-emails.md

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+title = "How to send free transactional emails with Cloudflare & MailChannels: Step by step tutorial"
+date = 2024-04-29T00:15:38+05:30
+tags = ["email", "cloudflare", "javascript"]
+draft = true
+layout = "post"
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+
+Back in 2022, Cloudflare introduced support for free transactional emails in partnership with MailChannels back
+I have known about this for a some time and I wanted to see if it's easy to setup and send an email.
+Turns out, its amazingly easy and free.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+Are you thinking of building a SaaS or a side project?
+You will run into a situation where you have to send emails to your users.
+
+Sending emails is a costly affair from popular email services like Mailgun, Sendgrid, Loops, Postmark etc.,
+It usually costs roughly in the order of a dollar for 1000 emails.
+A little bit less or more depending on the exact provider.
+AWS SES offers emails for 10,000 emails for a dollar, one order of magnitude cheaper.
+
+Sending emails is completely free with Cloudflare and MailChannels.
+But you still have pay for worker execution.
+It costs around 0.3 dollars per million executions for Cloudflare workers.
+This again orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS SES.
+
+So what's the catch? You don't have email deliverability dashboard.
+This is probably important for certain use cases like marketing emails.
+Maybe it's possible to build a dashboard on top of Cloudflare stack.
+It's whole another adventure in itself.
+
+Anyway, let's set up a Cloudflare worker to send an email.
+
+
+## Configuring DNS
+
+As a prerequisite, you need a domain whose nameservers are managed by Cloudflare.
+You need to do 2 steps to configure your domain.
+
+1. Add SPF record
+2. Add domain lockdown record
+
+A sender policy framework (SPF) record is a type of DNS TXT record that lists all the servers authorized to send emails from a particular domain.
+
+On your domain, you need to add the following as TXT record at root level
+
+```
+v=spf1 a mx include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all
+```
+
+According to MailChannels,
+
+> Domain Lockdown™ lets you control which MailChannels accounts and sender-ids are authorized to send an email that is addressed from your domain by specifying your preferences in a simple DNS TXT record.
+
+So, it's TXT record used by MailChannels as an allow list of all the domains that can send emails to MailChannels.
+In our case, create TXT record for `_mailchannels.yourdomain.com` as
+
+```
+v=mc1 cfid=<cloudflare worker subdomain>.workers.dev
+```
+
+You can find out your Cloudflare worker subdomain in Workers and Pages Overview page on the right-hand side.
+
+
+## Configuring Cloudflare Worker
+
+Create a new worker from Cloudflare dashboard and edit the code of the worker to be following
+
+```js
+export default {
+  async fetch(request) {
+    if (request.method !== 'POST') {
+      return new Response("OK");
+    }
+
+    // For testing purpose, replace this with your personal email
+    // so that you can see the message sent to your inbox
+    const receiver = '[email protected]'
+    // Replace <yourcompany.com> with the domain you set up earlier
+    const sender = '[email protected]'
+    const send_request = new Request('https://api.mailchannels.net/tx/v1/send', {
+      method: 'POST',
+      headers: {
+        'content-type': 'application/json',
+      },
+      body: JSON.stringify({
+        personalizations: [
+          {
+            to: [{ email: receiver, name: 'Test Email' }],
+          },
+        ],
+        from: {
+          email: sender,
+          name: 'Cloudflare Workers - MailChannels integration',
+        },
+        subject: 'Mail from Cloudflare',
+        content: [
+          {
+            type: 'text/html',
+            value: '<h1>Hello from Cloudflare worker</h1>',
+          },
+        ],
+      }),
+    })
+    const resp = await fetch(send_request);
+    return new Response("Sent email");
+  },
+}
+```
+
+Enable route trigger on your Cloudflare worker by going into the worker settings.
+
+That's it.
+You can test request by sending a post request to the worker using your favorite.
+An email should arrive shortly.
+