3 ms·
If you're already iOS/Mac users and using iCloud for anything, then worth looking at iCloud+ which now supports custom domains. I've been using this since day o
by hughrr 5y ago
If you're already iOS/Mac users and using iCloud for anything, then worth looking at iCloud+ which now supports custom domains. I've been using this since day one and had no issues so far and the killer feature for me the default iOS and Mac mail clients work 100% offline fine. I'm using Gandi.net as a registrar and DNS host, pointing MX/DKIM/SPF stuff at Apple, A records at a $5 Linode box running nginx.
Importantly this just works which is more than I can say for anything else I've tried ... anecdotes below...
I was using Fastmail before which is a good cross platform solution but the whole solution goes down the toilet if you want to use their official apps and offline support. Third party mail clients are almost universally complete garbage due to disparity over IMAP mailbox naming, sync issues and corruption. I haven't found one that works properly.
I fell out with Google and GSuite before this because something fucked up my domain provisioning and they couldn't fix it via support. Also I found out rather rapidly that the moment I converted my account to a paid GSuite account that my YouTube account required a $30 payment to be made before I could post videos to my own channel suddenly. They held my YT account to ransom and couldn't fix a provisioning issue. No chance. I will never deal with them again.
On Office 365 I deal with this at work every day and it's horrible. It started off reasonable but the feature load is weighing the whole solution down and now it's a crapfest of pain. Even the authentication processes are utterly painful every day requiring a half arsed authenticator app that works 50% of the time. I still maintain an office 365 family account so the kids can use the desktop apps for school work.
As for privacy, I think it is well oversold in the email space. The communication protocols don't guarantee privacy and no legal jurisdiction is particularly friendly. I think it's better to focus on deliverability and using another technology for secure or private communications. I myself use email only as the usual e-commerce and event receipt handling system. Out of the 100 or so people I have in my contacts, only my mother still actually communicates via email.
- pimlottc 5y agoDoes Apple offer a webmail interface or is it just through their own apps/imap? How do you find their interface compared to gmail?
- ericmay 5y agoThey have a webmail interface on icloud.com. It's probably not as "good" as Gmail - fewer features (is that worse?) but then similar to Gmail you can use any web client you want. Hell can't you sign in to your icloud email on Gmail and still use Gmail if you wanted?
- pimlottc 5y agoI assume you mean having Gmail connect to your iCloud email through IMAP?
- ylor 5y agoThey do, through icloud.com However, it does not compare favorably
- hughrr 5y agoYes they do offer a web app. It's nearly exactly the same as the desktop Mac app from a usability perspective. I can't really compare to Gmail recently however. It probably has feature parity bar some organisational stuff but is 100% completely different and you need to take time to learn it. Their cloud offering is fairly poorly promoted and no one seems to notice it exists. You have mail, contacts, calendar, photos, drive, notes, reminders, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and device location all via their web interface all of which real time sync with desktop and iOS apps. But note as always that the apps are Apple design centric which means they have intentionally limited feature sets and not many bells and whistles compared to some competition. If you learn to meet them in the middle they are monumentally powerful however, particularly in combination with Shortcuts app. I have a lot of event driven and schedule stuff set up with that which keeps me organised and kills a lot of routine tasks for me. I could not have set this up with Microsoft or Google ecosystems without resorting to actually writing horrible API manipulating code and having to host it somewhere. I just tap some shit out in the shortcuts app on my iPad or iPhone or Mac and it just works quietly and reliably. It's not perfect of course due to pre-existing expectations as a programmer mostly, but it's a real hidden chunk of gold once you wrap your head round it.
- 5y ago
- mdasen 5y agoYea, iCloud+ has been a simple, just-works solution. There's nothing fancy, it just kinda works how email should work.
- hughrr 5y agoIt's not fancy but there are some genuinely really cool things in the latest releases. Hide my email (Single use email addresses), privacy protection (remote content proxy) come to mind.