Apple Quietly Boosts Email Feature for iCloud+ Subscribers

I can’t see myself using iCloud mail until Apple starts syncing the read state of emails across my devices. Kind of unbelievable that they don’t do this yet.

Still all goes to 1 x inbox.

Would love them to allow you to have a seperate inbox tied to an alias on a custom domain.

My Apple Account is way too important that I refuse to use iCloud Mail — avoiding all eggs in one basket. If for some reason my Apple account ever got limited or locked out, I’d also be locked out of my email, too. I’ve seen too many horror stories of exactly this issue that it’s made me paranoid for myself.

At the moment I use a custom domain with Google Workspace.

Wait - I’ve been paying for years for email hosting. You are telling me I can have apple mail hosting this for me included with my Icloud+ subscription for only the cost of my annual domain registration???? WHAT!!?? That is a huge savings.

Wait - I’ve been paying for years for email hosting. You are telling me I can have apple mail hosting this for me included with my Icloud+ subscription for only the cost of my annual domain registration???? WHAT!!?? That is a huge savings.

Yes.

I used to self-host our several email domains and accounts on an Exchange Server. Unfortunately, it abruptly died a week before we were going on a trip to close on a new house. Brought them back up on a Family iCloud+ subscription in a matter of a couple hours.

I moved my own domain but it wasn't because of cost, for me it was because of reliability and not needing to try to understand and resolve issues.

I was storing my email in Gmail (free version) and using email forwarding on my domain to get incoming emails into my Gmail inbox and using GMail's send-email-as to send outgoing emails using my domain address but, I guess because of that simple and easy to set up scheme there were some ragged edges. Sometimes my emails would get blocked and I started getting quite a few DMARC failures in my final weeks before the transition. At that point I decided that I couldn't be bothered to work out how to fix those DMARC issues and, since I'd just moved my PC from a Windows machine to a Mac and signed up to iCloud+ Premium I might as well make use of the advertised iCloud+ feature to use my own domain with iCloud email rather than try to troubleshoot and fix my simplistic Gmail-plus-own-domain setup.

I already had my own domain but the Apple instructions for how to integrate that with my iCloud+ mail account were very clear and it took about a minute to set up and the changes propagated within another minute or two so it was a very painless transition. The more tedious bit was physically moving my 150,000 or so emails from Gmail to iCloud+ which did take a long time, I suspect largely because of (not unreasonable) throttling by Google's servers for such a huge download. I can't remember how long it took but I think it was the best part of 24 hours to complete the transfer but that didn't stop me using the email in the meantime, it just meant that for a while most of my history was still in Gmail rather than iCloud+.

Since the move I've had zero issues with emails getting rejected by recipients or any other problems.

So instead of name@icloud.com, your address can be anything@yourdomain.com.

The problem is that “anything” still needs to be fixed, you can’t actually use anything from one email to the next in the Mail app, like you can with other setups. You also can’t autofilter into different folders or inboxes based on address patterns.

(Also, yourdomain.com is already taken. ;))