Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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