I also setup a couple of custom domains with iCloud mail and I’m very happy with it!
Fastmail is great, and I think @RosemaryOrchard would be happier with it, but I definitely think that SaneBox is the way to go to make iCloud work better.
I suspect I’ll move over in a month or so! But this was an ideal time to kick the tires.
We have a family iCloud+. I have a custom domain with each family member having their own email address (me@mydomain.com, wife@mydomain.com, son@mydomain.com etc). My daughter will be leaving home next year to go to uni, and I have given her her own domain (eg cooldaughter.com) also hosted at Fastmail.
In the Apple User Guide it says:
If you are part of a Family Sharing group, you can share the email domain with members of the group. Anyone in your Family Sharing group can add a custom domain and choose whether or not to share it.
Does that mean that my daughter can have both daughter@mydomain.com and me@cooldaughter.com?
I just followed your link to link into it myself. Clicking through the instructions, I get to this page:
Custom Email Domain
Use iCloud Mail to send and receive email with up to 5 custom domains. You and your family members can each have 3 email addresses per domain.
So yes, each family member gets their own domain if they so choose.
But, the number of email addresses is limited, so my intended purpose (custom email addresses for the services I enrol to) won’t work with this.
@RosemaryOrchard I have been told, by the way, that Rules set up via the iCloud web interface do run server-side.
That’s the impression I get when I look at Settings → Rules on icloud.com, anyway. I have not tried it. However, it’s pretty clear that the rules are still not as robust as other options.
Speaking of which: I think @MacSparky is wrong about Gmail being the ultimate champion of mail rules. I have been playing with Fastmail and it seems to be capable of everything Gmail can do, plus it’s able to apply rules based on Contact Groups, which I wrote about on the thread @jaketheo started about Fastmail here. Neither Gmail nor Google Workspace(s?) nor iCloud can do anything with contact groups on the server-side, and it is a really convenient way of sorting incoming mail.
Changing the topic, am I the only non-American listener to be surprised at the conversation on e-waste? Waste electrical and electronic equipment contains more than 1,000 different substances, some of which (gold, copper, lithium) are rather valuable, but many of which are toxic for human health and the environment (lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, cadmium and plastics). Emissions resulting from end of life treatment can also release long life, hazardous compounds (such as dioxins and furans) into the environment.
I had no idea – but in retrospect should probably not have been surprised – that the US was so far behind Europe (and most other major Western economies) in dealing with what is, very literally, a toxic problem. It’s been nearly a decade since Europe belatedly introduced legislation requiring manufacturers and retailers to take back obsolete or failed consumer electronics for recycling, and to do so for free. Also for local authorities to provide at every recycling centre they operate separate facilities for the public to dispose of both small electrical and white goods.
I can understand that in a single, national market individual States may feel that they should not impose additional obligations on their suppliers and retailers, but what is it about the US that stops the Federal government from doing so? Lack of “give a damn”? It seems very short sighted, especially given its previous experience of international scale environmental catastrophes such as Love Canal.
I don’t want this to sound overly preachy, but the US is such a major part of the World economy that what happens there impacts everyone whether you live in Tallahassee, Tahiti or Totnes. Obviously we who live elsewhere have no say in US politics – much as we might love to be able to veto the actions of certain American Presidents – so in the (probably vain) hope of understanding better, I’ll just ask what we might be able to do to nudge the US into accepting that its actions have global repercussions?
I did same as you and switched personal domain over to iCloud, switched from Fastmail. Mainly because I can’t ever look away from the shiny new thing, but it has been working great so far. I have one domain for me, a shared domain with my wife, and then she also has her own.
You can setup server side rules on icloud.com but they are not as good as Fastmail’s so what each person needs matters.
I am guilty of keeping an always on Mac/PC to run mail rules as well. Nothing super important/automated, just to get rid of things I don’t need to see immediately or keep on the server (like pizza coupons). Now I use a M1, which is supposed to be always on, but it’s hit or miss as to when it runs the rules. Server side rules on iCloud/Hover/Namecheap are all pretty limited.
I’m hoping custom domains through iCloud+ works well. I’ve got both a family domain and business domain, so I’m curious to how that would work out. But it would be nice not to have to pay for iCloud+ and 2 email providers. I’m not sure how much I trust Hover’s deliverability, as my business emails occasionally end up in spam (even with DKIM).
@RosemaryOrchard I have been told, by the way, that Rules set up via the iCloud web interface do run server-side.
They do! They just are incredibly underpowered. I can only use one filter, and one action. No “email from X, with subject containing Y, mark as read and archive”, which is quite limiting.
However, MacSparky may have inspired me!
There is a program called imapfilter which runs as a headless imap client that just connects and runs scripts. You can set that up with cron (or though FaaS if you want) so that it runs every minute.
But it’s not quite as plug and play as the mail app…