Forms and email (all Cloudflare, no extra accounts)

The classic setup is a contact form from one company, a spam filter from another, an email sender from a third, and a monthly fee for each. Then the form breaks and nobody knows which of the three to blame.

Cloudflare does all of it, and most of it is free:

So the one question is: does your site need to email anyone other than you?

• No (most sites): a contact form that lands in your inbox and a hello@ address you read in Gmail. $0.
• Yes: "thanks, we got your message" confirmations, booking confirmations, order emails. That's the $5 Workers Paid plan, with 3,000 emails a month included.

Honestly, most small businesses don't need the confirmation email. You're going to reply personally anyway, and that reply is the confirmation.

The forms prompt

Add a contact form to my site, and set up email on my domain. Do all of it
through the Cloudflare API and wrangler, using my keys.

Form:
- Fields: [name, email, phone, message, plus anything specific: event date,
  budget, service type...]. Design it to match the site, including clear
  error and success states.
- Protect it with Turnstile. Create the widget through the API, put the site
  key in the site config and the secret in a Worker secret (save it to my
  vault too as TURNSTILE_SECRET_KEY). Add rate limiting as well.
- Save every submission to a D1 database first, THEN send the email. If the
  email fails, the submission must still be saved. Apply the database
  migrations in the deploy workflow.

My Cloudflare Workers plan is [Free / Paid]. On Free, only send to my own
verified address and skip the visitor confirmation. On Paid, do both.

Sending:
- Set up sending from my domain. Add every DNS record
  it needs (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, anything else) and verify the domain. If SPF or
  DMARC records already exist, merge into them. Never create a second one,
  and never replace or remove MX records.
- Send each submission to [YOUR EMAIL], from a no-reply address on my
  domain, with reply-to set to the person who filled in the form so I can
  just hit reply.
- [Paid plan only] Send the visitor a short, friendly confirmation email that sounds like the
  rest of the site. It must not repeat anything they typed (otherwise
  spammers use your form to send their message to strangers), and rate
  limit it per recipient address.

Receiving:
- Set up Email Routing so [hello@MYDOMAIN] forwards to [YOUR EMAIL]. Tell me
  when to click the verification email Cloudflare sends me. If MX records or
  a rule for this address already exist, leave them alone, even if an API
  status check says routing isn't configured.

Then test it end to end on staging: submit the form in a visible browser
window (Turnstile won't pass a hidden, automated one, so use Turnstile's test
keys if you automate it), confirm the submission is in D1, and confirm the
email was sent. Tell me to check my inbox (and spam
folder).

Can I reply as hello@mydomain from Gmail?

Yes, for free. Email Routing handles the receiving side. For sending, Gmail has a "Send mail as" feature that lets you pick hello@yourbakery.ca in the From box.

The catch on the free route: your email goes out through Gmail's servers, but it's not signed as your domain. Most inboxes accept it fine. A few strict ones put it in spam, and your domain's email security has to be set loose enough to allow it. For a bakery replying to customers, that's usually fine. For a business where every email matters, pay the $5 and send through Cloudflare instead, which signs it properly.

Here's what you do, because it's your Google account:

1. Turn on 2-Step Verification for your Google account if it isn't on already.
2. Go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, make an app password called "hello@ send-as", and copy it.
3. Gmail → Settings → See all settings → Accounts and Import → Send mail as → Add another email address. Enter hello@yourdomain and leave "Treat as an alias" ticked.
4. SMTP server smtp.gmail.com, port 587, username your full Gmail address, password the app password. TLS.
5. Gmail emails a confirmation code to hello@yourdomain, which Email Routing forwards straight back to you. Click it.

Then have the agent fix the DNS side:

I send email as [hello@MYDOMAIN] from Gmail using smtp.gmail.com (Send mail
as). Update my domain's SPF record to include Google (merge with what's
there, never a second SPF record), and make sure my DMARC policy won't
reject these emails (relaxed alignment, p=none or quarantine). Don't touch
the MX records. Then tell me how to check it works: send a test to a
mail-tester style address and read me the score.

On the $5 plan instead? Tell the agent: "Set up Cloudflare Email Service SMTP so I can use Gmail's Send mail as for hello@mydomain, signed by my domain. Create the SMTP credentials, save the password to my vault, and give me the settings to paste into Gmail." You copy the password from Bitwarden into Gmail's Send mail as screen yourself (steps 3 to 5, with Cloudflare's server instead of smtp.gmail.com). The emails come out properly signed, so strict inboxes trust them.

Why "save first, then email"

Not in the plan

Want a newsletter? That's a different tool (and a different guide). Cloudflare Email Service is for messages your site sends, like form alerts and order confirmations, not marketing blasts.