- Something I've been really excited about lately
is a new feature from Cloudflare.
It's called Cloudflare Email Forwarding.
I think it's something that's highly beneficial
for anyone with a personal brand or side hustle.
Here's the thing about Cloudflare.
They're a company that I've recommended using
for a long time for DNS reasons and security,
but I don't wanna get too much into the weeds
on the other products that Cloudflare offers.
If you're already a Cloudflare user
or if you haven't even heard of Cloudflare,
this is a game-changing feature
if you've been wanting a custom email address
but you haven't felt it's really worth paying for yet.
Now you can get it for free.
So, before I jump in and talk more about email forwarding,
the Cloudflare email routing feature
is currently available by requesting access.
I requested access on my account
and I actually don't have access to it yet,
but my creative director, he got access on his account
so we were able to take a look and evaluate this feature.
It's something that I am so excited about.
Email forwarding is not anything new.
It works at the DNS level and it uses email relays
to basically forward mail to an existing inbox,
so you could set up email forwarding
to go to yourname@yourdomain.com.
When someone sends an email to yourname@yourdomain.com,
it hits the DNS system and it forwards it to a Gmail
or an Outlook account, or I guess it could be AOL,
if you're really in the past.
Please tell me you're not using AOL.
But anyway, basically it's gonna forward email
from the custom email address
to an existing free email inbox.
So, why is Cloudflare's email routing such a big deal?
Isn't it kind of more of the same?
Isn't it sort of the same feature
that we've had free for years from other companies?
At its core, yes, but let me tell you why
this is a big deal.
Cloudflare is the leader in their space
of reliability and speed.
Let me tell you, I've used email forwarding before
from various different sources and it's often quirky.
Sometimes, I send an email to the custom email
and it can take five or 10 minutes to forward to my inbox,
or sometimes it doesn't even work at all.
But Cloudflare, their entire mission
is to increase reliability and speed of your website
and they take this very seriously.
So, with their email routing product,
if somebody sends an email to your custom email address,
I would trust that Cloudflare is gonna deliver it
to the appropriate place immediately.
So, how does this change the game?
Well, previously, if you wanted a custom email address,
you had to pay for email hosting,
having an entire inbox to yourself.
With email forwarding, it takes away that barrier.
You could have as many email addresses as you want
and forward them to as many unique emails as you want,
but there's definitely a problem here.
If you're following along, you might say,
"Now, wait a second, if I set up email forwarding
someone sends an email to my custom email address,
it forwards to my Gmail,
maybe the dedicated Gmail account that I set up.
If I reply to that email,
isn't it gonna come from my Gmail
instead of from my custom email address?"
And the answer is, yes,
this is definitely a quirk of email forwarding.
It's a limitation.
Now, there are two solutions to this problem.
The first one is to utilize a hack of sorts
that is free to use, and it will allow you to send email
from your free Gmail account back through
that custom email address.
It's something else that you have to set up within Gmail.
I'm gonna show you how to do that later in this video.
The second option is simply to pay for custom email hosting.
I suppose there is a third option too
and that would be just let your Gmail account show.
I mean, if you've got a side hustle or a personal brand,
it may be important to you to list your pretty email
on a business card or on your website, but maybe
you don't mind a reply coming from a Gmail address.
If you do have a side hustle,
it's probably not a big deal to your customers
that the email comes from a free Gmail account.
Maybe you don't need to worry about that at all.
But if you're certain you want the replies coming back
through that custom email address,
you have those two options we discussed.
Let me show you how this hack works.
So, I'm here in the Cloudflare dashboard and if
if you don't already have Cloudflare set up on your domain,
I have an entire video covering how to do that.
But assuming you already have Cloudflare set up,
we can see the email option.
It says beta right here on the sidebar.
I'm just gonna click that.
And again, if you haven't requested access
to this feature yet as of the recording of this video,
you're gonna have to click the big request access button.
I've already done that and I do have access to the feature,
so I'm just gonna click Create address right here.
I'll say hello@morganslawn.care
and it looks like it's got my Gmail saved
probably because I've done this before,
but you would just type your Gmail address right here.
I'll click save and it says pending verification.
It sent us an email.
We wanna click the link in the email.
You know the drill when you have to verify
your email address on a site.
Now, we're not done yet.
In order for Cloudflare email routing to function,
we have to make sure that these MX records,
really the DNS records are added to the domain.
Cloudflare makes this easy.
If you have any records on your DNS that say MX or TXT,
you may have to clear those out first.
Really just the MX records that's all we're concerned about.
You're gonna have to clear out any existing MX records.
Then, I can go over to email here
and just click where it says "Add records automatically."
Add records.
Makes it super easy.
I can go back to DNS. Everything has been added.
I don't have to type anything in manually or worry about it.
So, once we add these records, and once you click that link
and you confirm that your email is verified
right here under status, your email forwarding is set up.
So, when someone types an email to your custom email,
it will forward to your Gmail.
Now, we can move on to step two,
which is setting up the workaround
on how to route it back through your custom email.
And to do that, we go to Gmail.com.
Here I am in my inbox, and I'm gonna start
by gonna the gear icon in the top right corner
and clicking See all settings.
Now this is my favorite part because Gmail settings
are like, whoa, scary,
but take a deep breath (inhales and exhales),
it's gonna be okay.
It's gonna be fine.
I'll show you exactly what to do.
So, I'm gonna click up here
where it says "Accounts and Imports."
And right here we see Send mail as.
I don't want to send mail as CNM Innovations.
I want to add another email address.
I'm just gonna type my email. (computer keys clicking)
And we'll leave Treat as an alias checked
and click Next Step.
Now here, you have to enter some specific details.
I've got them written down right here.
They're also gonna be in the description below.
But for SMTP server, I want to change it to smtp.gmail.com.
Port is going to be 465.
Username is going to be your Gmail address
without the @gmail.com.
And here, I'm just gonna enter my Gmail password.
If you use two-factor authentication with Gmail,
you need to generate an app specific password.
I'm not gonna show you how to do that today
because I don't use 2FA on this account,
so I'm gonna click Add Account.
So, now Google has sent a confirmation code
to our custom email, which if you're following along
is going to forward back to this Gmail.
It sounds a little bit confusing,
but all we need to do is go back to Gmail.
Go to your inbox.
Right here, we see the email Gmail confirmation
so I'm gonna click the link to confirm the request
and click Confirm.
And there you go.
Gmail may now send mail as hello@morganslawn.care.
I'm back at my Gmail account
and there's one more step here.
I'm gonna go up to this gear,
See all settings, Accounts and Import,
and click make default next to our email.
And that way, when I do compose,
we see right here from hello@morganslawn.care.
The emails are gonna send back through
our custom email address and we have
an entirely custom email set up through Gmail
and Cloudflare for free.
Hey, by the way, I have to give a huge shout-out to Hasan.
I hope I'm saying your name correctly,
but a subscriber emailed me and told me
about this workaround, which I actually didn't know about.
Thank you, Hasan.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge
and now it gets to be shared with everybody.
So, this workaround is pretty cool.
We have email routing set up with Cloudflare.
It goes to our Gmail account.
When we reply from Gmail, the email comes
from our custom email address,
but there are a couple of issues with this.
First, if the recipient of your email is using gmail.com,
they're gonna see this little tag
that says sent via gmail.com instead
of your custom email address.
It's just quirky.
So, as I was editing this video,
I was testing this solution, the workaround in Gmail,
and I saw this big message when I sent a test email.
Gmail is saying, "Hey, we can't verify that
this actually came from morganslawn.care."
And this message alone is a reason
to consider going with email hosting.
Because if people see this message
when they open your emails, that's a big turnoff.
They may think that you're a scammer or an impersonator,
and that's just not good for anyone.
Okay, so who is the solution for?
I think if you have a side hustle or personal brand,
you should definitely be using Cloudflare email routing
to get email forwarding for free.
That way, you can have a custom email address forward
to your Gmail account or Outlook
or whatever email service you use.
Now, as for the workaround to send emails back
through that custom email address,
I would only attempt that if you're tech savvy
and you're feeling good about following the tutorial
and being able to troubleshoot future problems
that could come up.
I don't think the workaround solution
is a good fit for the average Joe unless
you're feeling tech savvy.
But, I do think that Cloudflare email routing
is pretty simple to set up.
So, if you have a side hustle,
but you're not super tech savvy and you haven't wanted
to pay for a custom email address
why not set up email forwarding?
But, if you run an established business
and you want a dedicated email inbox
for your custom email address,
that's what I do think it is worth paying
for custom email hosting.
I will say that I'm very excited
about Cloudflare email routing and if I have domains
in the future where I don't need a dedicated inbox,
but I just want a casual custom email,
I am absolutely gonna take advantage
of Cloudflare email routing and set up a free custom email.
Also, Cloudflare email routing is great
if you have an old domain where you need
to forward old email addresses to new emails.
I still have the domain, christiantaylor.co.
I used to have an email address that I listed
in certain places and some people still have
that email address.
Now can use Cloudflare email routing for free
and get great reliability to forward that old email address
to my new craylor.media email address
and that's something that really gets me excited.
So, what do you think of Cloudflare email routing?
Is it something that excites you?
Do you want to try it or is it not worth the hassle?
I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments down below.
And if you liked this video, do be sure to hit
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With that said, I'll catch you guys next time.