Note Follow me on @giuseppelt where I publish updates and collect feature requests and issues
Note A full tutorial on how to copy and setup your own EmailFlare for your domain is available at blog post
EmailFlare allows you to send emails from your own domain through Cloudflare for free.
As open-source MIT-licensed software, you can host your own EmailFlare on your domain and keep everything in control.
It provides:
- a simple email composer
- markdown support to enrich text with simple formatting, links ...
- configurable sender list, ex: hello@domain.com, contact@domain.com, ...
- auto deploy on your Cloudflare account
- you can host it on https://email.domain.com (subdomain configurable)
EmailFlare provides a simple builder to create your own EmailFlare and download the code.
You don't need to clone the repo, build, customize and run anything. Just use the UI configurator and click the Download button to get the code.
You'll get a single worker.js file. You can manually deploy it on your Cloudflare account. Follow the instruction on the tutorial article.
You can directly deploy your own EmailFlare for your domain. Use the Auto Deploy feature, and deploy EmailFlare on your own Cloudflare worker, with a handy wizard.
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You need to fill the Authentication section only the first time. Or, if you want change your password, you can type a new one in the Secret field.
More details available on the tutorial article.
Cloudflare and MailChannels made a partnership to allow sending email from workers for free. Announcement.
So, inside a Cloudflare you can call the MailChannels API and send email for your domain.
EmailFlare makes all this easy for you. It offers a web UI where you can compose emails and the code that runs in a worker to actually send them. You only have to deploy you own EmailFlare to your Cloudflare account.
EmailFlare is full-stack app (SPA + API) bundled in a single-file worker. It's easy to deploy a single file, you can just drag-and-drop it on the Cloudflare dashboard, or use the Auto-Deploy feature provided by the EmailFlare builder page.
As a fullstack webapp, EmailFlare includes both the client side — the UI — and server side — the API. Both sides are packaged and bundled together in a single-file worker.
A single worker acts for the two sides. It delivers the static assets — UI, scripts, images, fonts, … — to the browser. And, it responds to API calls.
Important EmailFlare is just an experiment on how you can deploy and serve a full webapp with a single worker, on the edge, or on a FaaS solution. This is a first step in a more advanced scenario I will show in the future. Follow @giuseppelt.
This is a monorepo managed by pnpm. This single worker experiment has a very defined concern separation. A webapp and an API, clearly isolated.
There're 3 packages:
- app - the client side
- api - the server side
- worker - build scripts, bundler and worker environment tester
The App is a very simple SPA app. It's built with preact, a lightweight alternative to React. The App itself is a single component App.tsx.
Remember when they say "organize your app and split it in small components"? Yeah, sometimes there's a need for transgression.
The App is full static. Just assets. The App talks to the API side with standard HTTP requests via fetch.
To run the App:
> cd packages/app
> pnpm dev
The EmailFlare server side is a Json-API. It's build with httpc, which allows to create APIs as function calls in an RPC-like fashion. With httpc you can use a typed client to ensure end-to-end type safety with typescript powered clients.
For now, the API expose a single call sendEmail. In the future, the API will be expanded to include personalization and state.
To run the API:
> cd packages/api
> pnpm dev
The worker package contains scripts file to actually build your own version of EmailFlare with your configuration.
The bundling is done with bun, with some black magic. Bun features import macros. The script imports all assets as inline resources at bundle-time inside the worker code.
> pnpm build:bun
If you don't have bun on your system, an alternative is to build with esbuild.
> pnpm build:esbuild
The build script assumes both the App and API are already built. So before calling the build script for the worker, just call the build for both the App and API.
The build produces a single index.bundle.js inside the dist folder.
Once built, you can test if the worker works. You can simulate a local workers environment.
> pnpm dev:bundle
EmailFlare is open source and developed on this repository. Every contribution is welcome, from error reporting to feature request.
Or, if you just want to discuss about it, feel free to head to open a issue and write your thoughts.
MIT (c) 2023 Giuseppe La Torre