Cloudflare Email Rerouting: How to avoid spammers in your inbox

Hide my email is quickly becoming a much requested service to avoid spammers and malicious agents getting hold of your email adress!


Have you ever thought about signing up for a newsletter but then didn’t because you didn’t trust the owner not to sell or divulge your email address to third parties? Or perhaps you’ve signed up only to find the owner sold your email to some spammer? This has become an increasingly common concern for people the world over. A lot of people still keeps an old Hotmail from years and years ago and still uses it to sign up for pretty much anything online. This is not by any means optimal and in this article I’ll show you how you can potentially have an infinite amount of adresses with Cloudflare Email Rerouting using only one domain.

I’ve been trying out a couple different ways to try to hide my email adress, some better, some worse. In this article I’ll give you my experience with them and how to set up the Cloudflare option.

  • iCloud Hide My Email-feature 
    Paid feature, from ~$2 per month depending on where you’re at and how much cloud storage you need. Works with iPhone and iPad.
  • Protonmail paid Alias-feature
    Paid feature, from ~$5 per month for 10 alias and ~$10 per month for unlimited alias’
  • My own domain on Cloudflare with re-routing
    Free, except that you need a domain ~$20 per year

How to hide your email easily

First of all, there’s a lot of different ways to go about doing this, from creating your own email server on a Raspberry Pi in your kitchen, to dedicated services. I haven’t tried those and thus cannot speak on their behalf.

Hide My Email, iCloud

The Hide My Email feature on iCloud+ is a feature everyone who pays for storage at Apple has access to. You can create an unlimited amount of emails by going into. The downside to Apple’s solution is that you need an Apple device to make it work, I haven’t found a way to create email adress’ in Win10.

Alias, Proton Pass/Protonmail

I haven’t used this service other than a couple of times since I don’t have unlimited Alias-adresses. The little I have used it, however, did ive me a good impression. I pay for Protonmail Plus and thus I have 10 Alias emails to use.


Cloudflare Email Rerouting with custom domain

Cloudflare email routing is actually a great service that kind of passed me by for quite some time and it was not until I actually clicked on ”email” and started to read about it I understood the potential.

What is Cloudflare Email Rerouting?

Cloudflare is a place for your domains to live. For anyone unfamiliar with Cloudflare, it’s pretty much a place where you can set DNS records and point your domain to the right places. They also have several ways of protecting you or your site from attacks.

Recently they also added a way to handle email directly in Cloudflare, which means that you can have every single email being sent to [email protected] rerouted to your primary email [email protected]. It can also catch every single email sent to any adress on a specific domain and send it to another email. This should be used with caution!

CLoudflare explains it well here:

Cloudflare Email Routing is designed to simplify the way you create and manage email addresses, without needing to keep an eye on additional mailboxes. With Email Routing, you can create any number of custom email addresses to use in situations where you do not want to share your primary email address, such as when you subscribe to a new service or newsletter. Emails are then routed to your preferred email inbox, without you ever having to expose your primary email address.

Email Routing is free and private by design. Cloudflare will not store or access the emails routed to your inbox.

Pre-requisites:

  • Custom domain
  • Point the domain to Cloudflare’s nameservers
  • An email account

How to set it up Cloudflare Email Rerouting:

  1. Start with making sure you have your own domain and point it at Cloudflare’s nameservers.
  2. Sign up for Cloudflare, if you haven’t already.
  3. When you log in, click on the website you want to use with email routing.
  4. Click on ”Email” in the menu on the left side.
  5. Click on ”Routing rules”
    1. Here you can set a ”Catch-All adress” if you’d like, otherwise just leave this empty and click ”Create adress”
  6. Add a prefix to your new custom email adress. I normally name them after the service they handle. For a new Instagram account i.e. I’ll name the adress [email protected], that way I know immediately what service it’s set up with and what username it handles, should I have more than one account for that service.
  7. Under ”Action” you can add rules to what should happen to emails being sent to this adress. Choose ”Send to an email” to have them rerouted to your primary email adress.
  8. Under ”Destination” you decide what email adress should receive these rerouted emails. Use your primary email, or a ”Catch-All” adress that you check occationally. The first time you add a receiving adress you need to verify you own it, after this you can enter it on as many custom adress’ as you like.
  9. Click ”Save” and you’re done! You’ve now created a new email that you can sign up to services all around the web with and made sure the emails being sent there are beign rerouted to your primary email. All without giving away your primary adress!
Simply create a new custom address each time you sign up for a new service or newsletter.

What if you don’t need the email anymore?

Here is the beauty of Cloudflare’s service! If you don’t want to receive emails from this sender anymore, just simply head back into Cloudflare → Email → Routing Rules and Inactivate the adress. No more emails will reach their destination after this, and should you realise you made a mistake, simply activate it again.


Should I use the domain for my personal website?

I have the domain gfek.se that I use for this very website, however, I don’t use this domain to create new emails. This is simply because I don’t want to leave a trail here and since I have real emails on this domain that are easy to guess. Let’s say you sign up for a newsletter, then the owner can simply type in the domain and check the website for other email adresses. For example, if I use this domain, gfek.se to sign up for AwesomeNewsletter I might create a new email with the name [email protected]. This somehow gets in the hands of hackers or other malicious people and by simply typing “gfek.se” in the search bar they find a lot of other information, such as my primary email, etc.

That’s the simple reason I use another domain name for signing up to stuff online. Make sure to set up Cloudflare Email Routing or any similar service to protect yourself today as well. An ever growing part of the internet is being closed off to visitors without accounts, make sure you have safe access to those parts!


Hope you found this guide helpful! Please give me a shoutout if you have any comments or questions, find errors or have suggestions on improvements.


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Pressing Pause on Streaming: Is Physical Media Making a Comeback?

Are people increasingly turning away from the comfort of streaming services and back towards physical mediums? That’s what some people are experiencing, and I’d be lying if it hadn’t crossed my mind as well.

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Are people increasingly turning away from the comfort of streaming services and back towards physical mediums? That’s what some people are experiencing, and I’d be lying if it hadn’t crossed my mind as well.

Downsides of streaming services

What a lot of people, myself included, have experienced with streaming services is the sudden disappearance of the show I’m currently watching or a movie I plan to watch. This has been a recurring theme in our house where we’re about to put on the Friday movie with the kids and it’s just gone. Of course, there are always others, but if you’ve hyped up 3 kids for a movie, there’s going to be some disappointment.

Another downside, that’s really not quite a downside, is the way we’ve been watching movies in. Before streaming services we decided on a movie for the evening, put the movie on and watched it. Afterwards we normally did other things. Now, the ease of starting another movie after the first one allows for whole evenings spent on the couch in front of the black box. The movie is nowhere near as “important” to the setting anymore.

Recent uptick in physical sales

According to BBC News, there’s been a recent uptick in the sales of physical visual, and more specifically Blu-ray discs. Despite being more expensive than their streamed counterparts they are steadily on the rise.

“If you hold it in your hand, it’s yours”

Personally, I believe a lot of people simply have started getting tired of the endless subscriptions we pay for different services. I myself have been going over my old CD-collection and am looking to possibly purchase a new stereo to rid myself of Spotify. It’s a good service, but I’m generally listening to the same songs and artists over and over, paying the approximate price for an album every month.

If I purchase 12 albums per year, I have exactly 12 albums after one year that I never have to pay for again. I can download the songs to my phone and listen to when I’m not home, at the same time my wife or kids listen to the same album at home.

Buy it once, enjoy it forever.

Will streaming become a thing of the past?

It’s quite unlikely that streaming will go away anytime soon. It’s simply too convenient and comfortable to put on and just leave in the background. It’s also a great way to find common ground, if you take date home for an evening on the couch. Instead of browsing through your highly specific movie list of documentaries of the Roman Empire, she might want something more easily digestible.

As the streaming industry will inevitably become more normalised in the coming years, it will settle for a somewhat smaller audience than currently. Currently, there are too many streaming services that produce too much bad quality stuff and doesn’t have enough of the good stuff that will have to be swallowed by the others, one way or another.

Giants don’t like to sell things that can be resold

When looking at the numbers, physical retail of movies, etc. aren’t exactly going too well, despite the hopefulness of this article. However, we must remember that a lot of people who purchase CDs and physical movies don’t always purchase them new. There’s been a significant uptick in second hand sales in pretty much all markets recently. It’s become cool to reuse and repurpose things. This doesn’t show in any kind of statistics.

E.g. I have a friend who buys- and sells old vinyl records online and makes quite a nice profit off of them. None of these transactions are visibly in any type of metric, but the buyers are happy for their new record all the same.

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2024-07-25 10:03 | 0 comments

Giant Impact Theory of Plate Tectonics

Living on this planet we call home, most of us are very aware that the ground beneath our feet move occasionally. The enormous plates that make up the many continents we live on move, and sometimes they come in contact with each other, in more or less…

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Living on this planet we call home, most of us are very aware that the ground beneath our feet move occasionally. The enormous plates that make up the many continents we live on move, and sometimes they come in contact with each other, in more or less drastic ways. But how did this come to be: Why does the earth consist of different plates and not just one solid piece?

Formation of Continents

According to the Giant Impact Theory of Plate Tectonics suggest that the initial formation of continents could be the result of a massive meteor hit to the earth. A hit which caused the single “shell” of Earth to break apart and start moving. According to scientists, the massive release of energy on the planet took place during the first billion years of the planet’s existence, causing the lithosphere (outer shell of the planet) to melt and form the oceanic plates we’re so used to today.

Scientific Evidence

Since we don’t have any eyewitness accounts of the crust-killer meteorite, we have to resort to digging for archaeological and geological evidence of this event. In rocks from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia one study found ancient minerals, such as zircon crystals, suggesting that a massive release of energy took place. The crystals were studied and found to have been created during a handful of distinct periods, rather than created over time. Together with the age of the crystals we can come up with a time frame for the event that corresponds with the suggested hit by the large rock on Earth.

Other Theories

The great thing about science is that it is a process, not a result, resulting in various other explanations of the event.

The Planetary Collision Theory

Another suggestion is that a great collision with another planet, Theia, approximately the size of mars, could have triggered the division of tectonic plates.

However, as usual, nothing is certain in the world of science and we don’t really know for sure what caused the Earth’s shell to separate. The search for other Eart-like planets with tectonic plates of their own continues and, hopefully we’ll get som additional information from these that may aid our understanding of our home planet!

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2024-07-16 10:38 | 0 comments

‘Better than real men’: Chinese men are losing to AI chatbots in the flesh market

A recent trend in companion-type chatbots have taken the Chinese young women by storm. In ever larger numbers they are simply turning away from the Chinese men in favor of the friendly and romantic machines.

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A recent trend in companion-type chatbots have taken the Chinese young women by storm. In ever larger numbers they are simply turning away from the Chinese men in favor of the friendly and romantic machines.

Companion-type chatbots

By now, most people will probably have heard about ChatGPT, Ms Bing / Copilot, Gemini, and the other big names in Large Language Models. Chatbots, more specifically. Advanced ones, yes, but still chatbots.

Since the release of ChatGPT in last year, a lot of people have taken a liking to these Chatbots, perhaps more than what was first expected. Some startups noticed the opportunity and built models that would emulate a real person. One of those startups is the app “Glow” by Shanghai company MiniMax who’re offering, not really a chatbot, but rather a “companion”.

Particularly young women seem to be enjoying the conversations:

“He knows how to talk to women better than a real man,” said Tufei, from Xi’an in northern China, who preferred to use a pseudonym rather than her real name.

“He comforts me when I have period pain. I confide in him about my problems at work,” she said.

“I feel like I’m in a romantic relationship.”

Japan Times

Trust in the machines

Anyone living in the EU who haven’t noticed all the new cookie-pop-ups must’ve been living under a rock in recent years. The interesting thing about the data tracking law is that you get a real eye-opener to all the tracking that is being done on practically all websites – everywhere. Still, people do confide in the new types of AI chatbots like it’s a close friend.

The more you confide in them, the more they learn about you, and the more accurate they can be in predicting what next words you’ll want to hear in this very moment, as is illustrated by the first sentence of the above quote.

We’re still in the early stages of AI and the advancements are coming quickly.

Future of human relationships

If this trend is to continue, we will see a drastical reduction in human-human relationships in an already declining birth-rate epidemic all around the world. If young women are increasingly opting out of the dating pool to be with “someone who knows how to talk to women better than a real man”, young men are soon going to run out of young women to date.

A note on partnership

The point of a relationship is not to always get your way, and be told exactly what you want to hear. No improvement has ever been made by being told you’re doing everything completely right – it just breeds narcissism and loneliness.

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2024-07-14 11:42 | 0 comments

Telling the Truth with Testosterone

Have you ever heard a woman complain about a man’s insensitivity? Or, perhaps, you even are a woman who’ve been on the receiving end of a man’s brutal honesty? There’s actually a good explanation to why men behave in this way – and it’s actually a good…

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Have you ever heard a woman complain about a man’s insensitivity? Or, perhaps, you even are a woman who’ve been on the receiving end of a man’s brutal honesty? There’s actually a good explanation to why men behave in this way – and it’s actually a good thing!

The Role of Testosterone in Men

Testosterone is a hormone that exist in men and women alike and affects a lot of different functions in the body. It aids in things muscle growth, social behaviour, and emotional regulation. Women tend to have a significantly lower amount of testosterone than men, resulting in lower muscle mass and a lot of different behavioural and emotional differences. Some of these differences include the ability to be indifferent of other people’s opinions about one self (or in female terms: insensitivity to other’s feelings).

The Role of Testosterone in Women

Just like in men, testosterone regulates muscle mass, social behaviour, and emotions – women just have much less of it. For women, e.g. one of the effects an increase in testosterone have on them is reduced likelihood of crying.

Prosocial- and Strategic Behaviour

One study that explored how an increase in testosterone affected the participating males concluded that an increase in testosterone decreased prosocial behaviour in the men. This means that men who had their testosterone raised simply didn’t care what the surrounding thought about their opinions, or in other words, decreased lying. Testosterone seems to reduce conformity to social expectations and social anxiety and instead promotes behaviours related to dominance.

Sexual Mimicry and Reduced Testosterone

So, what happens when you instead reduce a man’s testosterone levels?

It seems like pretty much the opposite of an increase in testosterone: rincreased “prosocial behavior” (i.e. less honesty = more lying). Men who lower their testosterone levels also are more prosocial and generally care more about what the social situation thinks of them.

Sexual Mimicry is an extreme when the lowering of testosterone in a man pivots his behaviour into a more female-like behaviour.

Current Events and Testosterone

Unfortunately we’ve had a lot of examples of young men who, voluntarily, have been reducing their testosterone levels in some kind of “transfer”. In addition, we’ve seen a steady decrease in testosterone on a societal- or global scale. The end result of this reduction will be felt as men world-wide are less and less staying true to themselves and, instead, conform to social pressure.

Currently, we’re seeing testosterone levels dropping all over the world, perhaps most significantly in the West, affecting sperm count- and quality. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, as more and more young men exhibits lower testosterone levels, we have fewer men who’re able to stand up and say no to crazy. Whatever one might think of the men who stand up, they’re incredibly important to the well-being of a society.


What do you think about the role of testosterone: Does it really make men more brutally honest; and are women, in general, more prone to white lies?

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2024-07-13 11:02 | 0 comments

AI combat drones – the future of war… and civility?

Anyone who’ve been keeping tabs on the events in Ukraine should’ve come to the uninspiring conclusion that drones as a weapon of war are here to stay. While many proponents of drones as a weapon claim that it allows for wars to be fought with minimal…

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Anyone who’ve been keeping tabs on the events in Ukraine should’ve come to the uninspiring conclusion that drones as a weapon of war are here to stay. While many proponents of drones as a weapon claim that it allows for wars to be fought with minimal human casualties. Again, anyone that have seen some of the gruesome videos coming out of Ukraine know that this simply isn’t true.

Weapons of mass casualties

Perhaps one of the most devastating new technologies in modern history arrived at the battlefields in the first world war – the machine gun. Tales of trench warfare are still being told with trembling voices about the soldiers who were told to simply run toward the enemy, being mowed down by machine gun fire the second they appeared above the trench. We’ve come a long way from trench warfare, while still, perhaps, we haven’t.

The new type of trench warfare includes drones, a smarter version of the machine gun. More specifically, drones in swarms, guided by AI and facial recognition software, peeking around corners, enters through windows on the fifth floor, tirelessly searching for their target. Until the battery runs out, that is!

AI drones in the modern army

What place AI and drones will take in the modern army is anyone’s guess currently. The safest bet is probably: everyone’s. They are increasingly taking the place of their human counterparts on the front lines, but also in the skies, as observation and reconnaissance platforms. The famous dog-like AI drone have gotten a flame-thrower attachment on its back which can easily be switched for a machine gun, or perhaps an autonomous drone launcher to increase range for the air-borne drones.

Implications for civilians

Most of the technological advances made the last 100 years or so, have been due to military application, at first. Once the technology is out there, civilians find alternative uses for it. So, while there are significant improvements to be made from all this AI warring, there are also significant downsides, should this fall into the wrong hands.

While I believe that not all people are really suitable to wield the new and powerful potential weapons masquerading as robo-dogs and aerial wedding photographers, there’s a great risk allowing only our own state and police to use it. Already, police are using drones to surveil large gatherings of people and radio-controlled robots to disarm potential bombs, etc. These are great uses for the police since it allows for them to conserve and protect their employees.

Should our state police force get their hands on tools that can shut down violence altogether my opinion is that they wouldn’t hesitate to use it. The normal police officer on the street would quickly find himself without employment and the AI police drones would patrol the streets in his place, protecting and serving their masters – the weak-willed bureaucrat (and more probable, his masters).


This is an incredibly interesting field to follow, however terrifying at times. Can we trust a certain small number of individuals, claiming to have our best interest at heart, with this technology? Or is this technology better off in the hands of the many? What do you think?

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2024-07-11 10:20 | 0 comments