This kind of makes sense.<p>Cloudflare is essentially a giant membrane / shield / firewall for your website (or network).<p>Area 1 could be argued as roughly the same thing but for email instead.<p>Cloudflare is likely expanding their play into this space for their security suite offering of managing every single thing in-and-out of an organization.<p>Personally, I hated the idea of Area 1 and relaying all private emails through someone else. We literally, to my knowledge of how it works, have clients updating their DNS MX records to all send through Area 1 versus their own private Gmail accounts!<p>But now that Cloudflare is taking over I do not really mind. Trust pays off.
Oooh, this could fill the missing gap in CF's email offerings ( they offer forwarding, but no smtp product ), hopefully while preventing abuse, yeah? Here's hoping this could lead to a full replacement product for google workspace captives
Will this work like the orange "proxy" icon for website DNS records, where I enter my Google MX records, click the orange cloud, and then Area 1 stands in between the web and google to stop certain emails? Or would this be more like a future use Cloudflare as my email inbox type of solution?<p>I'm eager to get away from Google for Business email but not excited about fastmail, etc.
Oh look, an acquisition I can be happy about!<p>Magic transit is a great product, but out of reach for some smaller organisations. SMTP protection is nearly, if not as important as HTTP protection.<p>I look forward to orange shielding MX records and keeping my inbound SMTP servers non-public facing (perhaps behind an Argo tunnel - if that's possible?).
I wrote about why: <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-are-acquiring-area-1/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-are-acquiring-area-1/</a>