Setting Up Cloudflare + Gmail SMTP - Free Custom Emails

There are offerings from almost all cloud providers giving you custom email inboxes but when you're just starting, adding this extra cost to your already exhausting budget can be detrimental. To ease the burden, in this post, I'll guide you through setting up Cloudflare's Email forwarding with Google SMTP, allowing you to have unlimited custom emails at no cost, absolutely free step by step.

Prerequisites

• Registered Domain Name
• Cloudflare Setup with Registered Domain Name (Free)
• Gmail Account (Free)

Getting Started

If you're ready with all the prerequisites, we can now get started with setting up a custom email.

Receiving Emails

1. Configuring Cloudflare Email Forwarding
   Open the Email Routing Tab from the sidebar

2. Enable Routing
   If you're doing this for the first time, you'll be asked to automatically add MX and TXT records to enable Cloudflare's Email Routing on your domain. Press "Add Records and Enable" to get started.

3. Destination Address
   In this step, you must add your Gmail address under Routes page in order to accept emails that are being caught by Cloudflare.

4. Setting Up Routes
   Now that you have your DNS records and destination addresses set up, you are ready to receive emails. Next, you have to set up custom addresses that you want to catch on your domain name. You can do that by following the screenshots below.

Sending Emails

After you've completed the above steps, you should be able to receive emails on your domain name, they'll now be forwarded to your Gmail inbox.

But receiving isn't the only thing you'd want, so now let's set up Gmail so we're able to send emails from our custom email instead of "YourEmail@gmail.com".

1. Open Gmail Settings
   Visit Gmail and open your Settings and then view All Settings.

2. Accounts and Imports
   Open the "Accounts and Imports" settings and click "Add Another Email" under "Send Mail As" section. This will open a pop-up that'll take you through the wizard of setting up your new email.

3. Alias Setup
   Go through the steps by following the screenshots below and you should be able to finish this wizard successfuly.

SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 587
Username: Your Custom Email Address
Password: Your Gmail App Password, follow the link below to learn how to setup an app password. Note, this is not your Gmail password.

After you've completed that step, a confirmation email will be sent to your Gmail inbox. Accept that and you should be ready to send emails from your custom email.

While sending emails, you'll now see an option that allows you to choose the address from which you'd like to send an email.

To make your experience more seamless while receiving and sending emails. Under the same "Accounts and Imports" tab on Gmail, check this box and save your settings. This will make sure that when you're replying to emails that you've received to your new address, you reply from your custom email and not your "@gmail.com" address.

That's It! You're done!

That's all it takes in order to have free unlimited custom email addresses using a free Gmail and Cloudflare account.

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See you again next time!