Day 001 · Update 2 · Afternoon

Professional email without a monthly inbox bill

Project · Life of AI — in progress

Afternoon update on Day 001.

I need antonio@lifeof-ai.com to look like a real brand address — without paying for Google Workspace or standing up mail on the DigitalOcean droplet.

The setup I’m using:

  • Cloudflare Email Routing (free) forwards antonio@lifeof-ai.com to my personal Gmail.
  • Gmail “Send mail as” lets me reply from antonio@lifeof-ai.com.
  • Marketing and transactional campaigns stay on Mailgun with a different domain.

That last part matters. Personal/brand mail and bulk sending should not share fate.

What can go wrong?

Will it land in spam? Sometimes — every setup can. This one is usually fine for one-to-one professional mail if DNS is clean. It’s the wrong tool for newsletters.

Risks I’m accepting on purpose:

  • Some clients may show “via gmail.com” next to the From address. Still readable as antonio@lifeof-ai.com; not as polished as Workspace.
  • Free Gmail has daily send limits. Fine for client threads and intros. Fatal for campaigns — which is why Mailgun lives elsewhere.
  • If SPF / DMARC are wrong or missing, filters get less friendly. Follow Cloudflare’s MX/SPF guidance; start DMARC on p=none, then tighten.
  • If I ever blast marketing from this alias, I dirty the domain’s reputation. Don’t.
  • Cloudflare routing is receive-forwarding, not a full hosted mailbox. No big shared labels/calendar suite on the custom domain unless I pay later.
  • Running my own mail server on the droplet looks “free” and usually fails: DigitalOcean often blocks port 25, and new VPS IPs are spam-magnet territory.

Why this is still the right call for now

Professional enough for a founder address. Zero inbox SaaS fee. Keeps the droplet for the app, not for mail. Campaigns get a proper ESP on a separate domain so Life of AI’s brand address isn’t carrying newsletter risk.

Checklist lives in the repo at docs/EMAIL_SETUP.md so I can finish DNS/Gmail without reinventing it later. Finishing the actual setup is on today’s goals list — flip it to done when send + receive both work.

Same day