Google Workspace Email Stopped Working After Enabling Email Routing in CloudFlare

Hi Everyone,

On Oct 5th, I was looking into into enabling Email Routing and stumbled across the fact that:

  1. Cloudflare was hosting my domain
  2. They could do it all from the dashboard

So off I went to read their guide and it seemed like a pretty straight forward prospect, considering Cloudflare has a wizard for walking you through this and “supposedly” doing this almost auto-magically.

Well, sure enough, today, I realized that after Cloudflare finished adding its MX Records in order to get this feature to work, my Google Workspace email stopped working.

I immediately disabled Email Routing, and asked Cloudflare to remove those MX Records. I believed here is when my email started working email. But obviously, during the desperation, I found a google article that walks you through yet another automated process for configuring their MX Records into Cloudflare.

At this point, everything is working, but looking at the audit logs, during the email routing wizard process, Cloudflare seamingly wants to do all the right things, like validating your email before the process is enabled, adding the records automatically, and so on… But yet, when the process is done, there’s no simple verification process to make sure your email is okay at the end of it?

I understand that you shouldn’t be touching these things if you don’t 100% understand what you’re doing. So here I am. Asking.

What information would we need here to understand the problem? I want to make sure what to do when I inevitably want to enable this later. What exactly went wrong here and how can I figure this out?

Thank you to anyone that replies!

Your MX record decides where your incoming emails are sent to. That is either Cloudflare or Google. Enabling email routing will thus mean that you can no longer receive emails in Google Workspace.

Why is this inevitable? What do you expect to gain by enabling email routing?

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Also, if you have Google Workspace – which has a fully-fledged business email solution for sending AND receiving emails, there’s absolutely no reason to even turn on Cloudflare Email Routing — which merely forwards incoming emails into existing mailboxes and cannot be used to SEND emails at all.

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