A self-hosted email platform, entirely on Cloudflare.

Doota is the studio's own product: an open-source, self-hosted email platform that renders mail as a chat interface — web client and developer sending API from one deploy, on any Cloudflare account. I designed and built it from first commit to production release, and it's the clearest evidence of how I build stateful systems on the edge.

RoleArchitect & sole engineer

LicenseOpen source

Runs onAny Cloudflare account

StatusIn production

Source github.com/etherCorps/doota ↗Live doota.dev ↗

The problem

Email is heavy, unbounded, and stubbornly stateful — and Cloudflare's edge is optimised for the opposite. No transactions in D1, a 2 MB row cap, a 10 GB database ceiling, and an inbound handler that must never drop a message. Building a real mail platform there meant treating each of those limits as a design input rather than a blocker: raw MIME as canonical truth in R2, an ingest path that acks before it parses, unique constraints as concurrency control, and encryption that still leaves search working.

What I built

One deploy, three products

The mail client Threads rendered as chat, quoted history stripped — SvelteKit on the front, streaming from the edge.

The sending API A developer API for transactional mail from the same deploy, so a team gets client and infrastructure at once.

The platform A multi-Worker architecture across D1, R2, KV, Queues, Durable Objects and Email Routing, deployed as code.

How it works

Inbound path

Receive

Email Routing invokes a Worker; the raw message streams straight into R2.

Ack

A pointer is queued and the message accepted — durable before any processing.

Derive

A Queue consumer parses, threads, strips quotes, encrypts, and indexes — idempotently.

Blind-token full-text search over encrypted content: the index never holds a readable word.

Deploy

A single infrastructure-as-code command (Alchemy), run in CI, stands the whole thing up.

Results

Public and checkable

23 / 23

CalDAV/CardDAV conformance on Workers

AES-256

GCM zero-access encryption at rest

Cloudflare primitives in one deploy

1 cmd

IaC deploy, runs in CI

Running it

Doota is live at doota.dev and maintained in the open — the repo, the docs, and the design decisions are all public, including a long write-up of the eight places the platform pushed back. Calendar and contacts are next, on the CalDAV/CardDAV layer already validated against the protocol suite. It's the reference implementation for how I'd build your system too.

Our services →

Practice 02 Platform & infrastructure The backend beneath the product: services, data pipelines, deploys, and the plumbing that keeps it up. From the blog What building an email platform taught me about where Cloudflare's edge pushes back I've spent the last few months building Doota — a self-hosted email application that runs entirely on Cloudflare.

Get in touch

I take on a small number of projects at a time.

Tell me what you're building and where it hurts. I'll say honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

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