I recently switched back from Spark to stock mail.app and overall having a good experience. I miss sparks iOS easy pdf format, but have embraced .eml files to devonthink for now (which works reasonably well on mobile). Current email is predominantly one gmail and one outlook (I pay for personal office 365). Only issue I’ve found so far with mail.app is it does not support aliases for outlook accounts from what I can see. Now that I am back to stock app am considering using my iCloud email, and see that iCloud+ supports custom domains. I have read through the multiple threads and see some negatives, most of which don’t seem to be a huge issue to me but would like some thoughts/clarifications.
Icloud+ directs to cloud flare which seems reasonably priced. If I’m using iCloud+ to host the email is there any reason to use a different provider?
I note that all email and aliases will apparently go to the same inbox (which I don’t see as a problem since I can do server side rules to just sort them to individual folders). This should not be an issue for me as I don’t use notifications for email anyway. Cloudflare has email forwarding (which sounds like it would let me make additional aliases above 3 allowed by iCloud+) and let me forward to another email address. If I were to forward these to say my gmail.com address when I reply does it come from gmail.com or does cloud flare have a way so it will show up from that alias?
How difficult is it to move my cloud flare domain to another service if I’m not happy with iCloud+ (I prefer outlook email, but appears I would need to upgrade to business and I think they only support godaddy, so I might be stuck with gmail at that point)?
What would be the benefit of fast mail? I see it talked about much but I guess I don’t see the need for extra cost unless I needed a ton of aliases?
I am considering also making a family domain. My last name.com is taken, but the option for last name.family is open, as well as lastname-family.com. I have seen some threads mentioning that non standard (aka .com, .edu, etc) email addresses do not seem to work on some websites. Would there be any reason to go for the .com over the .family?
Anything else I should be consider for my uses (aka 1 domain for a side gig business and another domain for family which will be shared between myself, wife, and 2 kids once they are older)?
I have a .info domain, and it is sometimes flagged as an invalid email address, although this is becoming more rare these days.
Still, I would recommend the .com. Possibly cheaper. Since this is a lifelong commitment and you and your family will be typing it thousands of times, I would shorten it up a bit, like lastname-fam.com. That will be easy for people to understand when an email address is given over the phone, for instance.
I am using icloud for custom domain and have a family domain on top of personal and it works great. I would recommend buying your domain on your own, I know apple just uses cloudflare but just own that part of transaction on your own so it’s always easy to switch around.
I use hover, but cloudflare is fine as well.
Like you said if you are paying for iCloud plus you may as well use it, but since you own domain you always have options later on to move elsewhere. That is best part of owning it.
For the $20 a year plan is there any benefit over the $5 a year (if using iCloud to host?)
Also Apple links out to cloudflare so I’m not sure they buying the domain"through Apple" means it’s not mobile. Appears to go to same place and you buy it on cloudflare.
Yeah it’s mobile if you buy through Apple, I just like taking care of the domain process. (not sure how Apple does it). I don’t think there is any advantage of Hover over Cloudflare, it’s just what I have used.
As for Apple and price, I think every plan comes with same e-mail.
