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If you want to try Apple’s:

I have tried the iCloud+.

It’s unstable, incomplete. Barely not shitty.

Deliberately sparsely and vaguely documented. Their support employees don’t know the features around custom domain, HideMyEmail etc and refuse to accept anything about it on email and then being typical Apple they simply say no to saying anything on email - hell, there is no email you can contact them.

They tell you “yes, this is the behaviour” on phone. They tell you “there is not documentation for it yet”, they refuse to say this on email. There is no email address you can write to. “No there is no other escalation or contact”. Trust me it’s a nightmare.

You hate Gmail not having human support? You’ll start appreciating Gmail’s no support when you will actually be talking to Apple’s support human being bots who will make you feel like hitting your head against the wall at least 7 times per 10 minutes while maintaining complete corporate composure and plastic professionalism.

If you want to use HideMyEmail it’ll be not on your domain. It’ll be locked to the subdomain (@privaterelay.appleid.com) of a company that’s the biggest walled garden this planet has ever seen and so powerful that it can just delete your account and you can do jackshit about it - yes, they have done it. The typical “find a connected employee at Google” also doesn’t work.

There’s not even catch-all. Max three emails.

Do yourself a favour and a get a real and dedicated mail provider like Mailbox, Fastmail etc because even after being few years older than Gmail iCloud mail is much much much worse.

Besides unless you’re also sunk in the walled garden up until your ears or maybe forehead you won’t be able to use 99.12% of iCloud+ anyway (Or maybe nothing if you stop using fruit company devices. I am not even sure and couldn’t figure out from their documentation and support)

Edit: Wow! Fruit company fans already at their downvoting game! Amazing! Ffs, if possible try to pull the fan part of that brain out of the place where sun never shines? I am also a “user” of Apple device(s), just not a “fan”. But it explains how yesterday there was a sub thread (on payment cut thread) how Apple fans give a pass to Apple for everything shitty and evil like feckless apologist drones.

So I made the switch from G Suite Legacy to iCloud+ (99 cents seemed like a bargain to try out) and it has a few kinks to work out.

Their documentation put double-quotes around the SPF records, and when I added them they didn't work -- had to remove the quotes completely.

And yeah, 3 email address limit and a weak icloud.com interface (compared to gmail) is also annoying.

But honestly I'll probably use it for a while, their IMAP support is good so I could always transfer emails out and point the domain records somewhere else. 99 cents a month is a bargain, the only other provider in that price range is Zoho Mail (which I also like and probably would have used if my contacts/calendar wasn't already on iCloud).

> @privaterelay.appleid.com

The @privaterelay.appleid.com is for email addresses that were created by using "Sign in with Apple", you don't have to pay for iCloud+ for that. If you create disposable emails with iCloud+ they come in the form: Coconut-Apple.0b@icloud.com (the words, numbers, and separators are random)

I'm using iCloud a as well right now as a stopgap until I find something more adequate.

Their IMAP is very slow (in true iCloud spirit). People will find it difficult to migrate larger mailboxes. I don't get why they can't just fetch my mail directly from Google.

3 email addresses without at least a catch-all option is not enough.

Their spam filter is rubbish. Even emails sent between members of the same family sharing group go to spam in spite of never leaving Apple's own infrastructure.

Many of my messages show up with an incorrect date, because they were moved between other email providers at some point, adding a more recent "Received" header. I don't blame Apple for this but it's definitely inconvenient having to preprocess the mbox file before uploading.

Apple Mail is highly unreliable and buggy. It deleted all my emails before. There doesn't appear to be any way to cancel a copy/move operation, which is particularly annoying when migrating a lot of email. But fine, there are other email clients (none that I like though).

Unfortunately, the rest of iCloud is really second rate as well. iCloud Drive has no versioning or ransomware protection whatsoever. You can't upload or download a folder from iCloud drive via the web interface. Sharing is crippled, insecure or impossible unless everyone involved uses Apple devices for absolutely everything.

So this is just not an adequate solution for any sort of professional use.

I'm trying Microsoft 365 right now. My experience started with an outage of the main admin site lasting for hours. But it can do a lot of things and it's fast. The downside is that you have to use their unbelievably sprawling, inconsistent, redundant set of admin interfaces that only make sense if you have been a Windows sysadmin since the (previous) .com bubble.

Why not just use simplelogin? Buy your own email domain and you can create random emails on the fly. Like if you're prompted to input your email you can use the name of the prompter companyxyz@yourdomain.com and it'll forward it to your regular mailbox. It's fantastic.

Actually if you just need that you can just add something random on your domain and mail will be delivered on that email just using catch-all feature that even some basic providers like mailbox.org provide, you don’t need any additional service layer for that. Sending emails from those addresses become tricky and cumbersome.

An alternative to Microsoft 365 if you don't need anything other than email hosting is their Exchange Online plan, which is $4/month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/excha...

This is what I ended up switching to and it's been working fine so far. I learned from this debacle that tight-coupling email to any other service is a liability, so email-only is actually a feature for me. No GoDaddy requirement either.

I would spent a little more and the the Business Basic plan. I think it is quite a good deal.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/business/micro...

I will use that I think. It is a bonus to get some web Office apps in addition.

I thought Outlook.com email was free ? Or is that something completely different or a different class tier that isn’t included in these discussions for whatever reason?

I think this discussion is just about email using your own domain.

I just did the Gmail —> iCloud transition and was frustrated that the MBOX format failed to maintain labels / folders. Everything went into a single place. On researching it seemed like the best process was to set up two IMAP accounts in Apple Mail and simply drag and drop the directories. I’ve done this, but it is still a pain and took 100x longer than I expected.

I really don't recommend doing that with Apple Mail. I did, many years ago, and ended up losing quite a few emails due to Apple Mail bugs; I did it again a few years later and ended up with weird corruption of email headers (wrong "received" dates).

That was way before the Catalina Apple Mail data loss bugs. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

Any sysadmin will tell you Apple Mail has had occasional weird dogshit bugs for a decade.

Use Thunderbird, it's more likely to be robust and not corrupt your emails, then feel free to switch back to Apple Mail once you've moved everything.

Huh it’ll start showing empty mails that’s full of text in other mail clients and web mail.

It’s been happening since 2016 (first time I noticed) and last reporter to them in January 2021. Then I gave up. It still happens.

Anyway that’s just one immortal Mail.app bug.

I am just in the process of finding another mail client (preferably native, paid, and open source that doesn’t read my mails)

Mailstores free home version works pretty well for this. You can backup your IMAP account in it, and then it has the option to export that archive to another IMAP account. It does retain folder/label structure (although it places them under a parent "Mailstore" label, but that's easy to fix after).

It will also read EML, MSG, PST, and MBOX formats, and connect to Outlook and Thunderbird.

https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/

that's because Google has "labels" as their own extension to IMAP. It's non-standard and they don't care. They know it's a lock-in feature.

If you have a linux box around, the "imapsync" tool works well.

Is that statement being downvoted because it's incorrect? (I have no idea, just asking because that statement appears relevant.)

Labels are representable via IMAP, but there's pretty much no relation between IMAP, Labels, and the MBOX format here - They're all ways of representing e-mails, yes, but they're basically orthogonal.

MBOX is a very simple format - It's a list of e-mails, separated by newlines. That's it, all there is to it. All metadata is in the form of e-mail headers. Those e-mail headers can be added by a variety of systems - Your MTA, the Sender's MTA, and MTA's in between (such as anti-spam appliances).

Gmail stores metadata about mail messages, and one of those metadata items is the labels that are applied to it. These are used to make searching easier, and are shown in the UI so you can select them and filter by them. Gmail Exports (via Takeout) add a "X-Gmail-Labels" Header that represents this metadata[1].

Gmail's IMAP interface shows you labels. IMAP as a protocol allows you to descend into folders, and to ask about the contents of folders. Gmail doesn't have folders, but it creates folder-like-views of your e-mail by selecting and showing messages that have those labels. It's a convenient interface, but it's a shim layer on top of Gmail, not in any way representative of how your email is stored.

The parent message is uncharitable and technically incorrect. It's not wrong that the gmail export experience sucks, but it's not right enough in the details to be a valuable contribution to the discussion in my opinion. Disclaimer: I maintained the Gmail Import API at one point in my life, and care deeply about portability.

[1] Interestingly, the header is different if you're accessing over IMAP vs from a Takeout export: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#acc...

I would argue the OP is correct gmail's implementation of labels is a proprietary extension of the IMAP standard. Now you are correct that it's not so relevant when exporting to mbox.

It should also be noted that placing labels into the message headers is a solution that can lead to information leaks, and one should be careful with it

The headers are kept (at least in some email apps) when you reply to those emails so the receiver will know your label for that message. So if you label email from your boss as "from idiot" he will know (and there are obviously more serious examples).

Regarding the Gmail labels in IMAP, I'm not sure why you talk about headers. The page you linked to is about the IMAP extension commands, AFAIK the labels do not end up in the headers in that case.

> One issue is that the domain needs to be with Go Daddy

Absolute dealbreaker.

There's no real reason why I can't just point my MX at them, do the additional configuration[*] and have them host my mail.

Any explaination would be pure (and utter) BS.

[*] being setting spf, dkim records and stuff

This is not accurate. I host through Site ground and have absolutely no issues setting O365 as my mail provider.

I don't think this is true; I am running Microsoft 365 and use AWS Route 53 and manually set up DNS records to work with Microsoft 365 just fine.

This is comparing o365 business and the personal offering.

The personal/home offering requires godaddy for the domain.

Does iCloud+ support catch all on custom domains now? I really like this about Google but would also be glad to go elsewhere

No they don’t and it’s a maximum of three email addresses per user.

Looking at it they don’t allow for “groups” or aliases either.

It feels years behind.

It has only just been rolled out. I think it’s still early days.

I’m using it for my domain fine but that has only two users on it.

You’re right it’s only just been rolled out but it’s missing so much fundamental stuff..

I want to make the switch, but I can’t yet. The lack of email lists “groups” is just holding me back. I have about 20 of them. I also have about 15 aliases…

It feels like it’s the beginning of Email…

I just moved my domain email over to Zoho following this news ($1/mo, was easy to set up). Seems to be working. Didn't feel like paying Google $6/mo.

I've been using Zoho for several years and I've been very happy. Only had 1 major outage (which was a bummer, to be honest) and I think they've improved their redundancy and reliability since.

Zoho has been great really happy with their setup

Oh wow I had no idea I could use a custom domain with iCloud, and I'm already paying for the 2TB tier and family sharing. Thanks!

+1 for iCloud+. I moved 3 business/family domains and shutdown my G Suite legacy account with no issues, and no extra cost (already paying for iCloud). Can't beat $0.99/mo for 50GB shared on up to 6 accounts.

+1 for iCloud+. I got the 200 to give my cousin a way to backup her pictures (around 30 GB, and it annoyed me she wasn't backing them up) The custom domain was nice, and I moved all of them to iCloud+.

You might want to read this reddit post about iCloud files disappearing. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/sixyvx/warning_files...

Just a heads up here:

iCloud / OneDrive / Google Drive / DropBox are not a backup solution despite the vendors promoting it.

They are there only for convenience.

I have experienced file loss on OneDrive. I am now using iCloud and have had no file loss whatsoever. I regularly diff my offline backup with iCloud Drive contents mirrored to my mac.

Also to note: About 50% of the stories you hear are users being morons. My sister lost some files. She deleted them after fat fingering something and blamed the cloud vendor (Google). It happens.

Make sure you back up stuff separately and fully offline. You’re just as fucked if someone rips off your account.

> Also to note: About 50% of the stories you hear are users being morons. My sister lost some files. She deleted them after fat fingering something

Some of these services (e.g. Dropbox) have rollback which would have helped in this situation, and most have a "Rubbish Bin" you can undelete from. I often click on the wrong thing because the web UI is lagging and I delete something by mistake.

I agree these services right now are all for convenience. There are horror stories from all of them, except for rsync (who are active on here) - I've never heard of any horror stories from their cloud service, but obviously if your payment stops for whatever reason, then all your stuff is gone with any of these.

I got a 15 GB account with Mega. I activated a bonus and got about 5 more. It's full now, but I forgot about that fact until I got an email about that I need to upgrade—bonus has expired —, or they're going to delete the data. But until I do, I can't delete the data, I can't do anything except pay, or everything's gone. So, I guess everything's gone. There is no way I'm putting my card on a service that kidnaps data.

AFAIK 20GB is now free forever for active accounts, so that email might just be a reminder to log in to refresh it.

If not, you can also subscribe via Google Play or the App Store and keep your payment info safe that way. (I didn't sign in to check if they support PayPal or the like)

If I ever will experience a file loss on iCloud I think I won’t even ever know the way it’s designed and the way it’s documented and the way way Apple deals with it even after reporting an issue.

Unless you deploy another tool or service to keep checking whether everything has been a file loss or inconsistency inside iCloud. Yes, it’s that opaque!

On the contrary on Dropbox I know exactly what is going on and there are features to revert a change.

Just migrated to iCloud with custom domain.

If something happens with your iCloud and you get really locked out, is there good support to get you back in?

With Gmail, there is basically no human support these days.

I just had a buddy come to me after someone tried to brute force his sbcglobal email and locked him out; AT&T have told him it might take someone up to 2 months to get to his support request.

+1 for Fastmail. I've used them for almost 20 years and their support has been great.

I just switched to iCloud as well, but I want all my email forwarded to my private gmail account. One thing to be aware of with iCloud is that it doesn't do ARC, so your forwarded emails will fail on SPF. I instead use cloudflare's email forwarding for incoming email, which does support ARC, and then iCloud for outgoing. Works well so far.

Are you sure that Cloudflare supports ARC? Last time I checked they used SRS for sender rewriting (that's why SPF doesn't fail), but didn't support ARC yet.

There's ARC headers on the emails I get forwarded, so looks like it. I don't know about SRS.

Does iCloud+ with custom domains support adding labels, e.g. youremail+label@domain.com?

Yes. It does

Yandex will do it for free up to 1,000 users.

I use Yandex. Not a heavy user, but perfectly happy with it.

Interestingly, I just went to register an organization on Yandex, and I'm forced to provide biz info now, including a TIN, seems like it's now inappropriate for families. Can anyone confirm this for me?

Their FAQ also states that it is only available for non-Russian residents that are businesses. Urgh.

Is iCloud+ IMAP/Push?

Yes and has been since it was introduced.

Unlike gmail they appear to implement the full imap protocol

> including Google where we've heard horror stories of getting locked out with no one to even contact --- [raises hand] Been there, done that.

Here is a workaround for Microsoft 365 to not host your domain with GoDaddy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

That "workaround" instructs you to use "v=DMARC1; p=none;" for your dmarc record. I'm not sure if Microsoft actually requires this, maybe it's because it doesn't support DKIM, but setting your dmarc policy to none disables SPF checks and is an extremely bad idea.

Not true. You can host through any provider and link it to Office365.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

Q: I already own a domain that's registered with a provider other than GoDaddy. Can I set up a personalized email address in Outlook.com?

A: At the moment, we only support connecting domains managed by GoDaddy with Outlook.com.

Maybe that only applies to "Microsoft 365 Family or Microsoft 365 Personal" and not their business offering? They have a basic business offering for $5/mo, but it doesn't include the Office apps (just the online versions).

EDIT: It looks like non-GoDaddy is for business/enterprise plans: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/a...

If you do some googling you can find forum posts on how to do it manually, though I've not tried it myself

An earlier post shared this https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

The manual workarounds are to do things like disabling SPF, which is a very bad idea.

The non-GoDaddy workaround from the adjacent reddit link works fine, not sure why the sibling comments have been downvoted so hard.

The reply to that about the workarounds disabling spf is wrong, at least for the adjacent reddit link. It includes relevant spf records and they appear to work fine.

I’ve been hosting my custom domain on the personal office 365 / outlook.com using these workarounds for a couple of weeks now and so far it has been working just fine.

Ideally dmarc and dkim would be supported, but it’s worth noting that it appear that neither of those are supported by the personal office 365 / outlook.com plan even with GoDaddy.