Set Up Free Custom Domain Email Using CloudFlare

Setting up a free custom email for your own domain is easier than you think. You don’t need to pay for expensive email hosting to get a professional-looking email address. Using Cloudflare’s email forwarding feature, you can have a custom domain email that forwards to your personal inbox without extra costs or complications.

In this post, I’ll show you how to forward emails from your custom domain to your personal inbox, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. I’ll also cover how to send emails using your custom domain through popular email providers.

Set Up a Custom Email for Forwarding on Cloudflare

Cloudflare allows you to forward incoming emails from your custom domain email address to your personal email account from an email service provider (ESP) such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. If your domain is not currently managed by Cloudflare, you can migrate your nameservers (NS) to Cloudflare to enable these features.

Follow these steps to activate email forwarding from your custom domain email address to your personal email account in Cloudflare:

1. Visit https://dash.cloudflare.com.
2. At Account home, click your domain (for example: yourdomain.com).
3. Navigate to Email > Email Routing.

4. At Email Routing, click Get started and add your forwarding details in the table below:

   Custom address	Action	Destination
   me@yourdomain.com	Send to an email	me@email.com

   note: me@yourdomain.com is your desired custom domain email address, and me@email.com is your personal email account from ESP.

5. Click Create and continue.

6. Confirm by clicking Continue.

7. At Configure your DNS, add the missing DNS records by clicking Add records and enable:

   Record type	Hostname	Priority	Value	Status
   MX	yourdomain.com	43	route1.mx.cloudflare.net.
   MX	yourdomain.com	58	route2.mx.cloudflare.net.
   MX	yourdomain.com	89	route3.mx.cloudflare.net.
   TXT	cf2024-1._domainkey.yourdomain.com		“v=DKIM1; h=sha256; k=rsa; p=XXX/xxx”
   TXT	yourdomain.com		“v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net ~all”

   Note: This table is an example of the DNS records you’ll see. Some values will be unique to your setup.

8. Finally, wait until the Routing status shows as Enabled.

Once completed, emails sent to your custom domain address will be forwarded automatically to your personal email account.

Set Up a Custom Email for Sending on Yahoo Mail

Follow these steps to send emails using your custom domain email address in Yahoo Mail:

1. Visit https://mail.yahoo.com.
2. Navigate to Settings > More Settings.
3. At Settings menu, click on Mailboxes.
4. Click Add button at the bottom of the Mailbox Management options.
5. Enter your custom email address (for example: me@yourdomain.com) and click Next.
6. Click Verify to setup your email.
7. Check your inbox for a new email with the subject: Please verify your email address.
8. Open the email and click the verification link labeled click here to confirm.

After completing these steps, you will be able to send emails using your custom email address through Yahoo Mail.

References

[1] “Easily creating and routing email addresses with Cloudflare Email Routing,” Cloudflare Blog, Sep. 26, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing.
[2] “Add, delete, or edit a Send-only address in Yahoo Mail,” Yahoo Help, [Online]. Available: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/add-delete-edit-send-only-address-yahoo-mail-sln28342.html.