Cloudflare Email Routing and Gmail: keep sending from your domain

What changes

Cloudflare Email Routing forwards mail to a verified inbox; it doesn’t send mail from your domain for you. (Cloudflare’s separate Email Sending product is aimed at apps and developers and needs a paid Workers plan.) Many people pair it with Gmail’s “Send mail as” and Gmail’s own SMTP server so replies come from their domain. Google is removing “Send mail as” for third-party addresses in January 2027, on the web and in the Gmail apps. After that, Gmail can still show your domain’s mail but can’t send from your domain.

What keeps working

Your Cloudflare routing rules keep forwarding mail into Gmail. Nothing breaks on the receiving side, so you can plan the move instead of rushing it.

Moving the domain so you can send from Gmail

ForwardMailTo receives your domain’s mail, forwards it to Gmail, and sends your replies and new emails from your domain. Your DNS can stay on Cloudflare; only the email records change.

1. Recreate your addresses. In Cloudflare, open Email Routing → Routing rules and note each address and where it goes. Create the same addresses in ForwardMailTo, pointing at the same inboxes. Turn on catch-all if you used Cloudflare’s catch-all rule.
2. Add the new records. Add the TXT and DKIM records the setup wizard shows you in Cloudflare DNS. For SPF, edit your existing v=spf1 record rather than adding a second one: replace include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net with include:amazonses.com.
3. Turn off Email Routing, then switch MX. Cloudflare locks the MX records it manages while Email Routing is on, so unlock them or disable Email Routing for the domain first. Then add the ForwardMailTo MX record. Mail keeps going to Cloudflare until this step, so do it last.
4. Check it works. The setup page rechecks your records automatically. Once the domain shows active, send a test to one of your addresses and reply to it from Gmail.

Sending after the move

• Replies: hit Reply in Gmail. The recipient sees your domain address.
• New emails: click Write a new email in your dashboard, pick who it’s for, and we open Gmail with everything filled in. People you’ve emailed before also show up in Gmail’s suggestions as “Name (via yourdomain.com)”.
• You can remove the old address from Gmail’s “Send mail as” list once you’re sending this way.

Related guides

• What’s changing with Gmail “Send mail as”
• Send from your custom domain in Gmail
• How the DNS records work