I currently have an iCloud+ Family Subscription via Apple One Premier Family. I'm trying to determine if I can utilize the iCloud+ Custom Email Domain feature to replace what I'm paying Microsoft for in the 365 family.

Effectively, this is my setup:

1. I have two customer domains I operate for my family. 365 handles multiple domains without any additional fees. Ideally, I'd be able to bring both domain names in and use one to forward to the other. Worst case, I can probably manage forwarding of the second domain at my DNS registrar.

2. Only my wife and I have actual mailboxes on 365 (which I pay for). Both my wife and I are members of the Apple One Family. However, since one of my domains is mylastname.com, I have mail forwarders setup for my parents, sister, etc. so that [email protected] forwards to their Gmail or whatever else they use. If I bring my domains into iCloud+, can I setup forwarders to send to external addresses?

3. My son (who is only 8) has an email address that is [email protected], but since he doesn't check email, I have it forward to my main email, and I use inbound rules to put them in a folder. It's mostly for his school or other sports stuff we sign him up for. Similar to #2, can I set up a random email in the domain to forward to another email inside the domain?

Again, I can do all of this in MS365. I can bring in as many domains as I want, and I can setup forwards regardless of whether there's an account or not.

Thanks for the help.

After getting tired of my three spam filled gmail accounts, along with an increased interest in privacy, I've decided to work on getting a better email setup elsewhere using a custom domain and email aliases.

After doing a bit of research, I've landed on either Fastmail or iCloud+ as the options I'm considering. I already have a custom domain and am just trying to decide where to ultimately go.

My main goal is to use aliases for my different accounts and only give my actual email address (which has my real name in it) to personal friends and family. The aliases will make it easier to cut out spam or quickly change things up in the event of a breach for that one account.

With iCloud it looks like I'm limited to three email addresses with my custom domain and then I would use Hide My Email to create a new alias for each account.

Fastmail seems to do this very well and I especially like that I can create all of my aliases with my custom domain so I can take everything with me in the event I change providers or Fastmail shuts down. Unfortunately Fastmail also costs $50/yr and I figured it was worth looking at iCloud given I'm already paying for iCloud+.

I'm just curious to hear how people like iCloud+ for email. I know lots of people have transitioned over from other providers. How was it? Do you regret moving to iCloud, if so why? I'm especially interested in anybody who chose between iCloud and Fastmail, or even better has used both products.

Thanks all!

Im considering moving from a selfhosted solution I have for my family email domain (using mailcow) to apple custom email domain solution. I need a few clarifications -

1. "You can use up to five custom domains, with up to three personalized email addresses per domain." - does it mean that each member in my icloud family can have up to three personalized addresses? meaning if we are 4 people, can I have in total 12 emails (3 each)?

2. "In iOS 16 or later, you can also share your custom domain with people outside your Family and allow them to create personalized addresses.*" - Does it allow other users outside of the apple ecosystem to use it as well, or is it still limited only to apple users with an iphone? and regardless of that question, a member outside of my family that accepts the invitation, will he be able to also create up to 3 personalized email addresses?

3. "You can share your domain with up to five other people. If you add someone who’s not part of your Family Sharing group, they need to accept the invitation before they’re added to the domain." - Is it aside for my family member count? If Im a family of 4, can I have my domain in use by up to 9 people?

Wow, somehow have not known about this feature until now.

I am strongly thinking of leaving GoDaddy as my provider (me and my family, 2 custom domains) due to expense, especially since they've switched to MS365 exchange email. It is always a hassle when something changes, and I have to re-verify with MS on each device over and over again. I don't need a business-capable email provider, so I think this will be streamlined as my family and I all are on Apple devices. Any thoughts or experiences out there? I've read a couple of older posts that had problems with MX records during setup.

Can someone explain to me the benefit of using iCloud's custom e-mail domain vs Zoho e-mail, something that I already have with my domain?

I know this is not selfhosting, but I randomly replied about this a couple of weeks ago on a yet another email hosting post and today got my 4th DM asking about it.

iCloud+ (which is when you pay for iOS backup) includes custom domain hosting. I had no idea too. There are no hacks or undocumented stuff involved. I’ve been paying for the 50GB storage option because it’s only $1 a month and makes switching between iOS devices so easy and convenient. I have also been paying for mailbox.org for years. This year mailbox.org raised their prices from $1 to $3 a month and included a bunch of additional online meeting, docs, etc services that I have no use for. While I understand the need to keep up with inflation and everything, I’m a very light email user. I have maybe 700MBs in total in my email account, and send maybe a dozen emails a month. I started shopping around for a mailbox alternative when I learned that I could already cover this with my iCloud+ subscription (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238) and my mind was blown.

I used to use fastmail before mailbox.org, and the process for updating DNS was always straightforward, but manual. You just go through their docs, copy/paste a couple of stuff, and you’re good. iCloud honestly took it to another level for me. It asked if I want an automated setup, I said sure, it asked for my domain, figured out it was from cloudflare, poped up a cloudflare SSO I’ve never seen before, then proposed a bunch of changes to my DNS records that I approved, and everything was done.

Anyway, just thought I’d post about this here in case anyone was interested. I searched this sub for iCloud, and didn’t find a similar post so excuse me if it’s a duplicate.

I bought a domain on Cloudflare and successfully managed to integrate it with iCloud Mail. I'm receiving emails that were sent to my custom email, but I can't figure out how to send messages from my custom email.

Let's say my main iCloud email is [email protected] and my custom email is [email protected].

I receive emails that were sent to [email protected] in (default) Mail app on iOS in the same mailbox where I receive emails that were sent to [email protected]. But if I answer on these emails, it is sent from [email protected] with [email protected] in copy. If I try to write a whole new email I do not see the option to send it from [email protected] (only [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc). I tried to add this [email protected] in Settings -> Mail -> Accounts -> Add Account and chose iCloud, and it is like it was actually adding, but in fact I can only receive emails on my custom email, not sending them from it.

Does someone know how to sent emails from my [email protected]?

In short, if you ever use an email address such as "[email protected]" and then decide to move it away or change it, then decide to use it again, you'll never be able to receive emails to that inbox again with iCloud, even though you own the domain.
Despite totally removing the email address from my iCloud account, unlinking the domain and totally "releasing" it, Apple kept a record that it was used at some point and now it's not possible to use it again, even though I own the domain and have linked it to a totally new iCloud account.
The video explains more, but basically you have no control over some aspects of your data, even when a request to delete that information has been submitted and apparently, there's nothing they can do about it.

https://youtu.be/AvmUutil-vs

So I plan on moving to the no-cost option of Google Workspace since they are ending GSuite Legacy accounts. I originally upgraded to a paid account but changed my mind once the no-cost option was announced and contacted support to get on the waitlist. The no-cost option comes without email.

So I decided to start testing iCloud Custom Domains with a secondary domain to see what we can do and if we will be moving our email to iCloud+ or somewhere else. Also it gives us a chance to see how seamless we will be able to transfer everything over.

Now onto the good part... I use iCloud+ Custom Domains when it first was in beta and thought it was awful, but I guess it's more advanced than I thought because today I have a small business success story for myself with a test domain and will be happy to transfer our main domain over when it is time.

So first of all we setup our domain and then setup 3 email address (me@, hello@ and support@), the first thing I knew is that 2 of those we gonna be used for other purposes. I needed SMTP for the hello@ and I needed to be able to forward our support@ to a Help Desk service.

Now this is very important for anyone using more advanced features. Don't try to setup anything using Mac Mail or iOS Mail. Everything needs to be done thru iCloud.com for it work work right, I spent 2 hours messing with rules on Mac mail before I tried on iCloud website.

Now we need SMTP for our website in order to send user account emails. On average we send our about 5-10 per day to new users. Well within Apple's 1000 per day limit. So in order to use SMTP you need to create an app password. Your login will NOT be your custom domain, but it WILL be your main iCloud email, whatever is set to default. And the password is the app one you created on appleid.apple.com. Make sure you use the highest security at port 587. I then sent a test email and it worked perfect. And I tested it by creating a dummy account on my site and it also worked perfect. So SMTP works.

Next step was forwarding emails from our new support@ to our help desk service using the forwarding email that our service gave us. Again now you cannot do this thru Mac or iOS mail apps. This must be done on iCloud site. First create a new folder, I called it Support. Then go to the setting cog in Mail on iCloud's site. Go to preferences and then rules. I created two rules and they must be in a correct order, you will see numbers next to the rules once created. The first rule I created was to forward all email sent to our support@ to the address my service gave to me. The second rule was to then mark those messages to support@ as read and move to the support folder we created. The forwarding must be rule #1 in the order. Then I tested it and it worked perfect also.

So yes iCloud Custom Domains can be used for small businesses and is a replacement for Google Workspace if you can live within the 3 email limit.

I’ve set up an email for a community group I run with iCloud. The email works fine in the mail app - but I don’t use the mail app, I want to add it to outlook on my phone/Mac with all of my other emails. How can I add it to Outlook? Apple support said it’s not possible, but when I looked online it seems possible…

I tried setting up a Custom Email Domain using iCloud+ over a month ago, and I still can't get the SPF records to verify, even though I've confirmed over and over again that they are correct, based on what Apple gave me. My registrar/DNS editor location is my web host, Siteground. They don't seem to support the @ in records, but I had no problems adding the quotes to the SPF record:

"v=spf1 include:_spf.mlsend.com include:icloud.com ~all"

As you can see, I had to compound it with another mail service I use, MailerLite, but I doubt that's causing the issue, unless their SPF record checker is somehow looking for the EXACT SPF record they supplied (even though they have fine print that indicates you can just add the include:icloud.com ~all bit).

I had it escalated to "engineering" but have yet to hear back yet.

The email is one I originally bought Google Workspace for and was hoping to switch to iCloud, since I'm so embedded in the Apple ecosystem, but now I'm afraid that's not possible. On top of this final step not working, I've now had the past month's of email disappear from my inbox, and I can't send/receive email, because the MX records obviously point to iCloud.com...which says "account doesn't exist" (when you try and send an email to it) because it's not finished being set up!

Does anyone with more experience with mail routing, DNS records, and the like have any suggestions?

ANSWER: Despite what their support pages say, at least with some DNS providers (in my case, my web host, SiteGround), Apple does not support compound SPF records. Or perhaps they do, but with a very particular format. In my case, once we deleted and re-added the record exactly as specified, with no other include: domains before the ~all, the verification step worked fine.

This does mean if you use your domain for things like mailing lists, you might have a problem, but I can afford to ditch the MailerLite SPF record, since I wasn't really using it.

I'm considering moving away from Google Apps to iCloud. What's you overall long-term impression so far in terms of deliverability, spam-filter, etc.?

GSuite Legacy Free edition is being EOLed in May and pushed to a paid-only Google Workspace plans. Not really interested in paying $12/m (minimum cost for feature parity of what I use now storage-wise) to keep my google drive and custom gmail account as I'd already been considering leaving google drive entirely.

I'm somewhat lucky in that only Photos, Email, and Google Drive are the services I substantially used under the gsuite account -- others are looking at losing their Play Store purchases unless they migrate to paid plans. This is still a major nightmare for me as my consulting work uses my custom domain for file sharing with clients/collaborators, but we have been considering switching to self-hosted next-cloud server to decouple ourselves from Dropbox/GSuite due to frustrations with changes.

I already pay for Apple One Family, and it seems like it may be a good option for various friends/family members within the ecosystem. And given that many people who kept their iTools/Mac.com accounts active can still use those grandfathered accounts, I actually have some faith in this custom domain service sticking around for another 20~ years.

Has anyone played around with it? The Webmail interface on iCloud.com seems decent. I think mailbox storage is linked to iCloud subscription size, but there doesn't seem to be even official documentation confirming this. The responsiveness of the imap server appears to be pretty good on iCloud.com account activity. Does it play with with regular IMAP clients like Thunderbird or Evolution?

My gmail account for my custom domain is less than 4gb. I think I could reasonably switch to iCloud-hosted email.

Hi,

what's your experience with iCloud Custom Domain for professional use?

I'm a freelancer and I tried to use the custom domain, which worked great but I had the following (small) issues that drove me back to gmail with aliases.

- Calendar: what is the default conferencing service? I prefer to use Google Meet so I went back to Google calendar (with my personal gmail or a free workspace account)
- Calendar: some external services do not play well... Cron does not yet support iCloud calendars, zapier and outlook neither. Calendly does it, but I need at least cron to block stuff in other calendars.

So basically my main grudge was not being able to work with the calendar along with other services.

I am asking here about your experiences to see if and how I can make iCloud Custom Domain work again for me.

I’m getting tired of Gmail. But I want to switch to iCloud which I have in my settings > name > sign in & security.

If I change it to my primary email will the phone force me to re-sign in?

I added a custom domain to my iCloud+ and am able to receive email to the account, after setting up all the details.

I’m wondering how I can send email from the custom domain address? It doesn’t seem to pop up at all in the Mail app.

Any help would be appreciated!