Cloudflare Docs
Area 1 Email Security
Cloudflare Docs
Area 1 Email Security
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Inline deployment

With an Inline deployment for your Area 1 setup, Area 1 evaluates email messages before they reach a user’s inbox.

More technically, Area 1 becomes a hop in the SMTP processing chain and physically interacts with incoming email messages. Based on your policies, various messages are blocked before reaching the inbox.

With inline deployment, messages travel through Area 1’s email filter before reaching your users.

​​ Benefits

When you choose an inline deployment, you get the following benefits:

  • Messages are processed and physically blocked before delivery to a user’s mailbox.
  • Your deployment is simpler, because any complex processing can happen downstream and without modification.
  • Area 1 can modify delivered messages, adding subject or body mark-ups.
  • Area 1 can offer high availability and adaptive message pooling.
  • You can set up advanced handling downstream for non-quarantined messages with added X-headers.

​​ Limitations

Inline deployments are not without their disadvantages. If you deploy Area 1 as your MX record, you will have to make changes to your DNS. If not — and you deploy Area 1 after your MX record — you will have a more complex SMTP architecture.

Additionally, this setup may require policy duplication on multiple solutions and the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

​​ Get started

For help getting started, refer to our setup guides.