Blog by Email
Members onlyHosted on your own Cloudflare account
Write an email, press send, and it's on your blog. I love how simple my own journal is to keep: I just email it in. So I've built the same thing for my members. It's free, it runs on your own Cloudflare account, and every post you send is laid out neatly and published for you.
Key principles
There's no dashboard to learn. Your subject line becomes the title and your email becomes the post, with your headings, links and pictures kept.
Your blog and posts live in your own Cloudflare account, not on my servers or anyone else's. Cloudflare's free plan covers it and you don't need a card.
Every page is one small file with no cookies, no trackers and no scripts, so it loads in a blink, even on a poor phone signal.
Features included
It only accepts email from your own address, and only if it passes the same security checks mail providers use. Nobody can post as you.
Start your subject with Draft and the post stays hidden until you're ready.
Every post sends you a reply with its link. Reply with Publish, Hide or Delete, or send the corrected post to update it. There's also a simple My posts page.
Attach or paste up to 6 pictures and they appear in your post, just where you put them.
Deleted posts sit in a bin for 30 days, so if you change your mind you can bring them back.
Put hashtags on the last line of your email and they become tags, each with its own page.
Simple links to share a post on Bluesky, X, LinkedIn, Mastodon or by email. Turn them off if you'd rather not.
Links to your social profiles and website at the top of your blog. Turn them off if you'd rather not.
A button under each post lets people reply to you privately by email. No comments to keep an eye on.
Put it on your main domain (yourname.co.uk), a subdomain (blog.yourname.co.uk) or a folder of your existing website (yourname.co.uk/blog/). Or use the free address Cloudflare gives you.
RSS feeds, a sitemap and tidy previews when a post is shared, all built in.
Pick an accent colour, light or dark, show reading time and pin a favourite post to the top.
How setup works
- Link your Cloudflare account
Sign in to Cloudflare from this page. A free account is all you need.
- Add your name and email address
Give your blog a name and tell it which email address you'll post from.
- Send your first post
In about 2 minutes you'll have your blog's link and your private posting address. Send an email to it and you're live.
Blog by Email is free. It runs on Cloudflare's free plan, which covers around 3 million page views a month, so only a very busy blog would ever need Cloudflare's paid plan.