Since I pay for iCloud+, and I have several domains + paid hosted email, I’ve been thinking about bringing it all under the Apple umbrella. I thought I would check in to make sure the experience will be as I expect it.
Current setup:
Personal email through Namecheap, which includes mailboxes for kids
Business email through Hover
Mostly use Spark, but also Mail.app for filtering
Goals:
Save $ by not having to pay for separate email hosting
Give kids an email address, so they don’t end up with multiple accounts/addresses
Questions:
With multiple domains, how is email sending handled in both Mails and Spark?
When I set up iCloud accounts and emails for my kids, will they need an “@iCloud.com” email or will they get to start with the new custom one?
I understand that with multiple addresses, email comes in to one unified box, so I would need to setup server side rules to separate those into folders.
Bumping this (I hope that’s ok). Hoping to find people with experiences with custom email domains. I must have posted at the wrong time, I know this forum loves its email.
I have two email accounts set up on all my devices in Mail (Mac, iOS, & iPad). Yes, there is a unified inbox which includes all items from both of my accounts. But I can easily select either one inbox, which only shows the messages received to that specific account. I tend to switch between the two individual inboxes and ignore the unified inbox. Others may prefer to work differently.
When creating a new outgoing message, Mail will default to send the message from whichever account I am currently viewing. However, if I want to change the “from” address, I can just tap or click on it and a list pops up and I can select a different account to send from.
I’m not sure I follow your questions regarding setting up email accounts for your kids. I would avoid setting up alias to your account. Instead set up a separate full account for each person. That way they can keep that account (if they want to) as they get older and get their own devices/move out/etc. In fact, as they get their own devices, you will want to create separate Apple ID accounts for each of them (of course you can keep all of the accounts within the same “family” and share purchases etc.), which will require a separate email account for each anyway. My boss has recently run into this as he set his daughter’s iPhone up on his account. Then when he latter gifted her some earpods, they would immediately disconnect from her phone and connect to his every time he used his devices. He is now struggling to find a way to disconnect her phone from his account without losing all of her personal data on her phone. I suspect he will need to wipe it and set it up as a new device on a new account. His daughter will not be happy about that.
I definitely want my kids to have their own iCloud accounts and custom domain email. From what I understand, they will need a standard iCloud account+email before I can give them a custom domain email. Though not ideal, it’s not the end of the world either. I would just like to avoid them having multiple accounts. Yes I know their custom domain email will be tied to their iCloud account and not separate. I have an old iCloud account that uses my gmail that I can’t get rid of because it’s got my purchase history and there’s no way to merge or transfer those purchases. So that account lives as a member for Family Sharing purposes, plus I have my normal iCloud account as well. I’m just trying to set them up so they’ll have one email/login for anything they sign up for. Although I don’t think I’ll be too successful, as I have them set up in a Microsoft family (for Minecraft), and I think they have randomly generated outlook email addresses. Oh well.
If anyone has experience using multiple custom domains in 3rd party apps using iCloud, I’d like to hear it.
Long time since this thread received any action but wondering how your experience ended up being with this? I switched over to doing this exact setup a couple months (about the time all my ‘grandfathered’ free custom domain Google suite accounts all suddenly became ‘ungrandfathered?’).
I listened to @MacSparky@ismh86 cover this in a recent episode but they both seemed really recalcitrant to use this professionally.
I’ve been quite pleased so far and have:
1 personal custom domain for myself
2 business custom domains (I’m currently the only email recipient but am taking advantage of the 3 accounts you can have for each so have added other boxes such as info@ sales@ etc.). Obviously this is the point where if you had multiple staff you’d outgrow this unless you’re happy to just forward to others, but this doesn’t end up looking terribly professional if their replies came from a personal account)
2 personal custom domains that I recently bought for each of my boys (yes they obviously need existing iCloud accounts on my Family plan and the email account for that pre-configured as it all runs through that).
I’ve been recently bouncing back to Apple Mail from Spark, but can say that it works just fine in Spark – you just need to add Aliases for each email address to your iCloud account.
Like many other Apple services there’s the 5–10% that I wish would get implemented such as:
Allow the additional accounts to display independently from my base iCloud email in Apple Mail. I most often view my email all in the Unified inbox anyway but sometimes you want to drill down and only see what is coming to an individual account but it’s all jumbled up in the iCloud account Inbox. Maybe you could create some Smart folders on Mac Mail I guess but that ends up in a different place plus I haven’t tried but I’m not sure those show up on iPadOS, iOS as you certainly can’t create them there.
Custom email signatures: This is mainly a failure of Apple Mail. It’s very frustrating that we’ve come this far and AppleMail still offers features not available on Mobile Apple Mail. For one, I love the ability to have multiple signatures for even one account and manually choose or even have it randomly pick one of them. But you can’t create ones for your iCloud custom domains and none of the above shows up on Mobile Mail. Spark comes through here by allowing you to create and set default signatures for even email aliases, plus HTML signatures! It bewilders me why this is not more widely supported in email clients for instance you still have to hack these in to Apple Mail or Outlook (they both support sending HTML email content so why is this so hard to implement?). For clients we have to use an expensive third-party service to create and attach HTML email signatures for their Office365 accounts.
Since’s Spark’s redesign, I stopped using it. I found I could do basically everything in Mail. Plus I think the custom domain emails sent from 3rd party clients aren’t DKIM signed. I’ve gotten much better at deleting/archiving email, and I think Spark just changed the wording of archive, but I didn’t like it.
So far, I’ve kept my business domain separate at Hover. There’s nothing special about Hover email, it’s just cheap and already there. If Apple Mail ever improves, perhaps I’ll move it over.
My kids now have their own iCloud accounts. However, I haven’t bothered to share the domain. They don’t really use email anyways. Wife has shown little interest in using the domain as well.
I have been using the catch-all emails for a couple things. For example, I use food@customdomain for all food orders, and then an iCloud.com mail rule to put all those emails (and coupons) in a folder.
I’ve also been using iCloud+ feature “Hide My Email” feature a lot. Slowly but surely, I’m going though my accounts and changing the emails associated so in the event of some security breach I’m more protected.