The Custom Email

I forgot to write about a major change with my email.

Initially

I found out about a feature in Cloudflare called Email Routing. It forwarded emails received from a custom email inbox to my Gmail address, so every time someone would send an email to personal@anirudhsevugan.me, I would receive the email in my regular inbox (with a bit of extra delay since there’s one extra step in receiving the mail).

But then I realized that unless I paid, Cloudflare wouldn’t allow me to send from that custom address. So I figured out a trick you can use with Gmail that is actually promoted by Google themselves. Gmail’s regular SMTP servers (the same used for a gmail.com email) are also supported for custom emails. Their free server, smtp.gmail.com, used for any free gmail.com email, also supports custom email addresses for completely free, with the same limits as a regular Gmail address. No extra limits just because you use a custom address.

But the one issue is that to allow for DKIM, a process where email is cryptographically signed to verify where it came from, you had to pay for Google Workspace. I didn’t realize this at the time, so my email failed all verification checks because I never set them up. I set up SPF to allow Google’s servers to send mail when verified later, but then that showed a message saying “sent via gmail.com”, and the “via” part was a link to a Google Help Center article that said the reason this appeared is that either SPF or DKIM wasn’t set up properly.

Now that I had set up SPF, Gmail showed this because it also wanted DKIM set up. Earlier, none was set up, so it just sent unauthorized, meaning it sent mail as if it was some foreign email address that isn’t yours because you didn’t authorize it yet.

I didn’t like this, nor did I like no DKIM since even Gmail’s free email addresses have DKIM. So I found out about Brevo. They had less emails sendable a day than Gmail, but quality is better than quantity, and besides, I rarely send email anyway. So I went with their Free plan (which is free forever), which came with trials for various features, such as custom phone lines of your own (which I used, and even after the trial ends it is still usable, just with more limitations), and more.

Email provider change

I changed my email provider from regular Gmail SMTP to Brevo SMTP, which has a lot of benefits. One, I now have a custom phone number, but due to privacy reasons I can’t tell you what it is. Two, now there are no verification issues with my email. Every verification check gets passed. Three, it feels unified with the rest of the stuff I used, and not out of place. Four, their free plan is absurdly generous, but their business and enterprise plans are on the more expensive side compared to their starter plan

So now you can email me at personal@anirudhsevugan.me without getting bombarded with verification warnings and issues.