Cloudflare announces free email offerings to prevent phishing and increase security

Cloudflare announced its entry into email security with new offerings to help solve email challenges in an easy-to-use way that gives customers more control. Now, users will be able to create custom email addresses, manage incoming email routing, and prevent email spoofing and phishing on outgoing emails—all for free.

Cloudflare also announced that customers can sign up for early access to its Advanced Email Security Suite, tightly integrated with all of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust solutions.

Email is one of the largest threats facing both consumers and businesses today. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center 2020 Internet Crime Report shows that phishing attacks were the most common type of cyberattack in 2020. The reason, according to Forrester: “the biggest problems with email are its ubiquity and our willingness to trust it. Every person has an email account, often more than one, making this medium a perennially ripe target for attackers.” Solutions to date have made inroads into the problem, without comprehensively tackling it.

“Customers have asked us to address email security for years. Today we’re announcing new tools that will help close the biggest remaining network security risk that Cloudflare hasn’t already covered, until now,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. “We want to be the network that businesses of any size can plug into for all of their needs. While today marks our first step into this space, we ultimately hope to become the leader in email security.”

Creating, managing, and securing email services can be complex tasks requiring technical expertise. Cloudflare is announcing two features that customers can take advantage of to help with this.

Cloudflare Email Routing

First, Cloudflare is providing customers with powerful new email routing tools to streamline email management. Cloudflare Email Routing will give customers more control over their email and empower them to have professional addressing while relying on any email hosting provider, whether it’s hosted Exchange, managed Office 365, Gmail, Google Workplace, or an old Aol.com address. This is particularly powerful for small businesses who may want to have a custom domain on their email addresses, but behind the scenes still be managing everything out of a consumer Gmail account.

Email Security DNS Wizard

Second, Cloudflare is providing tools to help anyone with an email address better protect their brand against phishing and spam. In the past these were difficult to configure and it was easy to make mistakes. Now, with Cloudflare’s Email Security DNS Wizard, it’s one-click for any Cloudflare customer to configure network records like Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to protect from attackers misusing domains to send malicious emails.

Cloudflare customers can take advantage of these free features to:

• Create custom email addresses in a few clicks: Customers can quickly and easily configure custom email addresses for their domain, all with no cost.
• Consolidate multiple email accounts into one unified inbox: Now customers can have a custom domain email address that is automatically forwarded to their preferred mailbox (i.e. Gmail or Outlook) without anyone ever knowing it. Now [name]@[your company].com will keep your email professional and on brand, but available on whatever email provider you are using.
• Inform them of gaps in email security: Cloudflare will automatically display warnings and recommended actions to users if there are gaps in the way they have set up their email security DNS associated with their domain.
• Help secure their domain from phishing and spoofing attacks: Cloudflare will guide website owners through the process of creating the required DNS records to ensure their domain is safe. Creating these DNS records prevents malicious actors from spoofing unsuspecting users’ email domains and sending out fraudulent messages.

Cloudflare also announced its Advanced Email Security Suite, tightly integrating email protection with Cloudflare One, including Browser Isolation. The suite will offer full scanning of emails for security threats, and work in front of any email hosting provider to supplement the anti-spam and security protections they offer.

Because Cloudflare’s global network blocks an average of 87 billion cyber threats each day, the company has unique threat intelligence that can allow it to more effectively filter out targeted phishing attacks (spear phishing) and other security threats that general purpose email hosting providers can miss.