Catch-all addresses are a must have for me now. I allocate unique addresses to every website as these are more robust then using the + operator because they can't be stripped off.
I've already busted one company (I presume selling) my email address to a cloud provider for them to send me marketing material.
I emailed their privacy officer and didn't even get a reply, but that's OK, if it continues, one sieve rule and I can delete any mail that arrives on that address.
I just hope the spammers don't get so advanced they start forging other web sites addresses, maybe I'll have to move to a hashed and salted version that they can't forge.
I use "-" instead of "+" with a regex: "/^name-.*@mydomain\.tld$/".
Then I block them when I get spam after they get compromised. Many spammers already know to remove anything after the +-sign.
But I must admit that the biggest benefit of this setup, was listening to my girlfriend on the the phone explaining to someone, at some company, the reason that their name was part of the email-address:
"That is because if I get SPAM, I know that I can't trust you."
...
"Just make sure that you don't sell it, or get hacked."
...
"If you are already expecting to get hacked, or sell it... why should I do business with you?"
Bad error messages is kind of an institutional problem at Apple. Somehow there’s a push to “simplify” the error process and it invariably means that some part of e pipeline has good error info that is, if you’re lucky, dropped in a log somewhere and just completely swallowed if you’re not. In the UI you’ll just get a generic “something went wrong” or a “translated” error that isn’t bijective at all, or sometimes not even an indication that something went wrong (particularly around ambient operations like syncing). It’s really quite frustrating how often I need to go through a truly awful amount of spelunking just to figure out what a “user friendly” message means, which is pretty much the opposite of user friendliness.
I get user friendliness for non tech-savvy users, but they should definitely have something like "details" that you can expand for power users, especially somewhere like custom domain management/DNS record checker where there are probably power users using it.
Like many, I got bit by the end of legacy free Google Workspace so I've been figuring out my options.
One related issue is how to get email off of Google Workspace. After checking out various options, I've settled on using imapsync (https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync).
Protip for those moving to iCloud+ custom email domains, you HAVE to temporarily set the SPF record to exactly match what Apple wants to see during the initial setup. Else it will complain that setup cannot be completed. You can revert it to whatever you had it set to previously (plus include:icloud.com) once the setup is complete.
FYI for anyone seeking to download all their emails (or any other data stored by Google) they now have a handy tool developed at the behest of the EU: Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com/
Having to exactly match records -- SPF included -- is one of the grievances outlined in the article. What I should probably have also mentioned is I also reported these using Apple's iCloud feedback form [1], and it might be helpful if others did as well. Unlike Radar / Developer Feedback, Product Feedback doesn't reply back with an ID you can use to track the feedback status :-(
I would say another main issue is that while they ask you to setup DKIM records, they do not actually DKIM-sign your emails. Hence your mails may be more easily flagged as spam. Several people have reported this to Apple, but AFAIK it still hasn’t been fixed.
This sounds bad, does it have practical implications? Have people switched to apple hosted custom domains for email and suffered deliverability problems?
You're right -- this is something I missed mentioning. As of right now, it's still only the web-based iCloud Mail that makes use of DKIM. Using any other client/app will deliver your emails unsigned.
Would you mind if I updated the article crediting you for the DKIM addendum?
I'm optimistic that Apple is working on most of these issues (especially catch-all) right now and this is just representative of their new offering.
Like many things I've seen from Apple it will take a release cycle or two (of 1-2 years per cycle) to bring in this arguably basic functionality - as is tradition we'll groan about other issues being held back in favour of fancy new features.
I have no doubt they intend to fully compete with the email services from Google and Microsoft. Following on from last year we should see VPs taking us through the updates to iCloud+ alongside device launches as it expands into a fundamental service offering.
I would fear that Apple forgets about the feature after a few years and then just drops it. This is not central to their business and Apple trims such things very agressively.
I would always buy a domain-email from somebody who has this as their main business, and I would never couple my email to Apple which could lock me out of my account if they think I "behave suspiciously".
In fact I am planning to create accounts for my yet to be born children just so that they will be able to have that <fancy short id>@icloud.com. Because like you I also have faith in Apple and I’m pretty sure they would take 10-15 WWDCs stage announcements to get all of these things right unless they deemed these features as “nobody wants it and we know what they want instead”.
> I have no doubt they intend to fully compete with the email services from Google and Microsoft
Both Google and Microsoft's email services are aimed at large enterprise customers. Apple is targeting theirs towards individual end users and their families. They aren't competing in the same space.
I moved my emails to iCloud plus email domains less than a month ago. The import of existing emails was excruciatingly slow. I mean, 1 email per second on average, then failing with some random error halfway down the line (120k emails), even on retries, causing your migration agent to give up.
I spent the better half of a week trying to get it to work, ended up moving to Google Workspace instead.
I reckon some people have an inherent need to keep things inside Apple’s walked garden. I often see it becoming nothing short of an obsession.
For the rest I’d, as someone who gave it a try - almost their entire services suite including TV etc a thorough try, highly recommend to stay out.
Stay out even if they improve it (which I doubt) from its current state i.e. pathetic.
- Apple is a weird company but they are weird because they can afford to be weird in the way they are because they know their fan base (their majority/core users)
- Their software and services have revisions/major updates/upgrades tied with OS versions.
- Even across OS versions they so deliberately don’t add the most essential features and literally “hold back” as if they go completely deaf on user needs
- I believe it stems of a inferior software engineering prowess and a lack of confidence - that “let’s keep it for the next OS release” so that we announce on stage “For the first time in any iOS - you can control two SIMs separately - TrueSIM™ - or named something ridiculously absurd.
- They have repeatedly shown they’re not callous about user needs or feedback but they’re openly hostile to it.
- The “just works” smoke is very much cleared by now and they’re either just too incompetent or stupidly adamant still trying to ride the fan wave of “they know what we want” and fans giddily shoving everything down their own throats claiming as the best whatever Apple churned out. I skew towards the former though.
- Also they do not have real competition with other softwares, more so on iOS and iPadOS, unlike Android (which I develop for but am not a user of) you literally don’t have options of softwares for many basic usage.
- Now one can argue they like it that way - I don’t. They have anyway such a locked down App Store - not letting users choose browser, SMS apps etc is just a poor excuse that they can somehow get away with.
I would just treat them as a device seller and keep my software and services from other competent places. Besides I like my eggs in various baskets.
The last thing I want is my email from a provider which 100% coupled with devices from one manufacturer that is locked down like never before in history and their locking users out puts Google’s famous locking out to shame.
If you believe the things you wrote - weird, institutionally dishonest, hostile to its customers and grossly incompetent why would you buy anything ever from them?
If it's just for custom domain and email, then Infomaniak is yet another choice, on a price to features, unlimited storage (for email) and hosting country (privacy concerns with Apple and US, anyone?!?) ratio solution. I have recently moved my custom domain hosting from a more expensive service, to Infomaniak, and I got the first email address for free (the main from my Google workspace), to which I may add some more, if all works as expected, in the next month or so.
I took a glance at their website. Does it do all the things the original article mentioned? Like setup catchall email, route email to specific addresses (like I have 3 people in my family, Jane, Akbar, Jeff, jeff@mydomain.com goes to him, but everyone@mydomain.com goes to all of us, yet parents@mydomain.com goes to just the 2 parents). I want that, plus it's part of the current hodge podge of email verification standards so it won't be blocked as spam when I send from there.
That's the most valuable feature of goggle mail and domain hosting to me.
Seems like the email service is only available if you buy the domain from them or transfer the domain to them. I couldn’t find how one could use an existing domain that one owns without transferring to them.
I use ProtonMail because of their good support for custom domains. Their higher focus on privacy and security is nice, but it has little to do with why I chose them vs competitors. The only downside is you have to use the ProtonMail app or website on mobile, because of the way they do mailbox encryption.
What put me off from ProtonMail was their ridiculous "pay us money for extra domains" charge which makes it obvious to me they are not as honest as I initially thought they were. Allowing me to connect other domains to my one mailbox shouldn't cost them anything beyond the initial costs of developing the code to support multiple domains which they've obviously already done.
This was something I was hoping to get around with using a separate relay like ImprovMX or Cloudflare's Email Routing -- that'd allow you to have a bunch more assuming you didn't need to use them for outbound emails -- discovering issue #2 in the process. And issue #6, if you did want to use them for outbound emails :-)
With the way that Apple prevents you from reusing Apple IDs, does it mean that if my Apple ID is blah@mydomainname.com and I migrate mydomainname.com (currently using G Suite free) over to iCloud that I can't set up blah@mydomainname.com?
You can. However, if you switch your Apple ID to a different address before you set up both the domain and the blah@mydomainname.com address to route to your account, you won't be able to set up blah@mydomainname.com for any account under your iCloud subscription for a year.
Yeah valid complaints but none of them I’ve noticed myself. It works really well for me.
I suspect apple will be producing another subscription model or extension to it to support these features once they’ve proven it in production for a bit.
Another problem that I have is iCloud+ storage limit of 4TB. My family will very soon get very close to this limit with all our photos, videos and other stuff. Is anyone aware of any plans for an increase in near future?
Great resumé. With luck Apple will address these: I’ve been curious about moving my domains from Google and Apple seemed like a good choice for me, but these would be show-stoppers for me as well.
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback, glad I was able to provide some relevant insight.
I'm hoping shining a light on these pain points turns some heads at Apple so we end up with a better service and one more good competitor in the hosted email space -- if you don't mind it being Apple, of course. :-)
After the end of legacy G Suite was announced, I tried using iCloud+ to forward my personal domain to Gmail. However, because iCloud does not seem to support ARC for forwarding, Gmail was sending too much to Spam.
I tried many other mainstream forwarding options and settled on Pobox as the best overall option, and moved my personal domain over. It's working pretty well, flowing to my regular Gmail account and having aliases set up in Gmail.
When I got burned by the legacy G Suite announce, I had similar bad experience with Microsoft 365 for Families. They - for some reason - only support custom domains that were registered/moved to GoDaddy (there is unsupported 3rd party guides on how to bypass checks but anyone with the requirement of stable email reachability will obviously not rely on that). Too bad you find that out after you setup your account, billing, mailbox etc.
My mum's work email address changed and we changed the email address associated with her apple ID. She had no end of tiny bugs pop up - especially in the first couple of weeks after the change.
Apple's systems in general don't seem to cope well with email addresses changing or being deleted. I think lots of software engineers use email addresses as if they're an immutable primary key. This just isn't the case.
My biggest problem with it is I cannot sign up to iCloud+ because I don't have an apple device or a windows pc I could install the iCloud app onto.
I suspect if I was to borrow one trying to use the mail on an android device would be fairly miserable making it not worth it but would be nice to have the option to try without needing to jump through hoops.
Apple designs services to cater to its own hardware, first and foremost. The intent is to get more people to buy Apple hardware. Any apps or services available on other platforms are usually poor efforts from the company (like iCloud or iTunes on Windows or Apple Music on Android).
With Apple focusing more on growing its services business to compensate for any saturation in the hardware market space, there’s some chance that the situation might improve for other platforms (but those would be Windows and Android, not Linux). But Apple already has about a 70% profit margin on its services. So it’s unlikely that other platforms will be prioritized in the next few years (it’s not in Apple’s DNA).
Fastmail is not a good replacement for family needs because it’s quite expensive at one mailbox per person. Those who need multiple mailboxes should look at other options.
I jumped onto iCloud emails as soon as it became available this past fall and immediately ran into #6. I set up test email accounts in my iCloud account including my wife's just to see if it would work - Evidently that was a mistake because when I removed then attempted to reregister her email under her iCloud account (same "Family") it blocked her with the same opaque error message mentioned. I reached out to Apple support and after going back and forth for 1-2 months, they finally said it was "by design." Because my iCloud account first set up her email address (then subsequently removed it) it was permanently tied to my iCloud account even though we were in the same family. The support rep said there was nothing more that could be done other than moving to another email provider.
tl;dr; Emails can only ever be registered with one iCloud account ever, even in the same Apple family
I switched my domain to iCloud+ the first day it was offered. It took over an hour to get working, but I am happy enough with the service. I did switch to using Apple’s e-mail client apps for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
Like using all e-mail services, I make periodic local backups in case I ever want to switch my domain to another service.
I know this is an old thread, and I don't use catch-all addresses (well I did back in the wild-west of the web, but we're talking over 20 years ago), however it's funny to see how many people are like "Gmail spam filter caught it" or "several domains with Google workspace and had no problems". I've used other email systems; which for example, use SpamAssassin; and the amount of shit that comes through. So yes, catch-all is all the rage, if you're using Google, however if you're not, expect a bunch of spam, right? I hear more and more people wanting to getting off the "G" ecosystem, so I guess it'll be different responses to this in the near future.
iCloud+ seemed like a great value proposition for people migrating from Workspace, but there are quite a few hangups. Seems like Microsoft hits a good middle ground.
Completely off topic, but why do people think having a sticky header indicating how far "through" an article is, is worth disrupting the content for?
Valid point -- sorry the header is getting in your way. Out of the available theme for Ghost I found this one taking away the least from the actual content - I'll look into getting rid of the header bar as traffic subdues not to break anything now :-)
Microsoft does hit a great middle ground -- but there's still far too little players IMO. Would enjoy if we also had Apple as a contender -- especially if they'll remain as big on their service businesses as they claim.
We just went down the rabbit hole of trying to migrate to Microsoft 365 Family with custom domain. You (officially) need to move your domain to GoDaddy, which was unfortunately a blocker for us as they don’t support our domains TLD.
From what I read DKIM also isn’t offered on Family which is disappointing. Business plans get expensive quickly when you want Office apps as well.
OP, not that this may yield any quick results, but this post should be emailed to Eddy Cue (cue@), the SVP of services, and Tim Cook (tcook@) at Apple. Some of the emails sent to them do get responses.
I'm surprised Apple supports custom email domains to any extent. Apple is a consumer electronics company. Hosted email on custom domains is very distinctly not a typical consumer behavior.
It fits in great with the privacy narrative Apple has been pushing for and marketing for a while now. With their announcement of focusing on services, I think it makes perfect sense. Definitely not an easy problem for them to tackle, especially with what must be decades of legacy systems and various relays (Mac.com, Me.com, iCloud.com, ...).
For as long as iCloud existed, people have been clamoring for custom domains. I think it might have been possible back in the iTools or MobileMe days? Maybe I'm mis-remembering.
Me, I've experimented with migrating some of my domains from self-hosted to iCloud+, simply for the ease of management and reducing the headache from SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. It turns out I have a spurious DNS record that was causing all my headaches, which I had forgotten to remove from older experiments, and I didn't need to migrate to solve this.
In either case, it's a nice convenience feature. Despite the trend, and the HN-think, Apple DOES do things for power-users sometimes.
I suspect it is because Google suite threatens Apple’s office web offering.
Offering custom domains for personal can link up to office documents and this can make its way into business use.
For small businesses already standardizing on Mac hardware, it’s natural they should want to get the privacy and in-ecosystem utility of an apple version of Gsuite.
I was irrationally hoping Apple would offer a service that allowed for custom domains with accounts outside the family group. E.g. so I could let my extended family enjoy the benefits of our custom domain, but also have them manage their own billing direct with Apple.
I'm just going to switch over to Fastmail (currently on an end-of-life'd gsuite setup).
Hey Email looks to have some great features, but at $12/user/month it's more expensive than Exchange Online or Google Workspace, which means it's more a choice about whether a user values Hey's nifty features (and they do look nifty) than an easy option for email domain hosting vs the OP's issues with iCloud+.
For my family's email needs, $12/user/month is a bit of a non-starter given the competition.
cube00|4 years ago
I've already busted one company (I presume selling) my email address to a cloud provider for them to send me marketing material.
I emailed their privacy officer and didn't even get a reply, but that's OK, if it continues, one sieve rule and I can delete any mail that arrives on that address.
I just hope the spammers don't get so advanced they start forging other web sites addresses, maybe I'll have to move to a hashed and salted version that they can't forge.
mortenlarsen|4 years ago
But I must admit that the biggest benefit of this setup, was listening to my girlfriend on the the phone explaining to someone, at some company, the reason that their name was part of the email-address:
It was priceless.noja|4 years ago
Are you using a salt or something along with the company name? Or could we guess the e-mail address for a given company?
voisin|4 years ago
nsomaru|4 years ago
Razengan|4 years ago
Who? So we can avoid them.
encryptluks2|4 years ago
saagarjha|4 years ago
can16358p|4 years ago
umlaut1|4 years ago
One related issue is how to get email off of Google Workspace. After checking out various options, I've settled on using imapsync (https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync).
Unfortunately, the official Docker image was throwing errors for me while trying to move an almost 100k email account. Ended up building a modified version which I have now been able to successfully use to migrate. Image: https://hub.docker.com/r/jauderho/imapsync Dockerfile: https://github.com/jauderho/dockerfiles/blob/main/imapsync/D...
HTH.
Protip for those moving to iCloud+ custom email domains, you HAVE to temporarily set the SPF record to exactly match what Apple wants to see during the initial setup. Else it will complain that setup cannot be completed. You can revert it to whatever you had it set to previously (plus include:icloud.com) once the setup is complete.
Gareth321|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
[1] https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html
miken123|4 years ago
bredren|4 years ago
marban|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
Would you mind if I updated the article crediting you for the DKIM addendum?
abestic9|4 years ago
Like many things I've seen from Apple it will take a release cycle or two (of 1-2 years per cycle) to bring in this arguably basic functionality - as is tradition we'll groan about other issues being held back in favour of fancy new features.
I have no doubt they intend to fully compete with the email services from Google and Microsoft. Following on from last year we should see VPs taking us through the updates to iCloud+ alongside device launches as it expands into a fundamental service offering.
silvestrov|4 years ago
I would always buy a domain-email from somebody who has this as their main business, and I would never couple my email to Apple which could lock me out of my account if they think I "behave suspiciously".
crossroadsguy|4 years ago
In fact I am planning to create accounts for my yet to be born children just so that they will be able to have that <fancy short id>@icloud.com. Because like you I also have faith in Apple and I’m pretty sure they would take 10-15 WWDCs stage announcements to get all of these things right unless they deemed these features as “nobody wants it and we know what they want instead”.
paxys|4 years ago
Both Google and Microsoft's email services are aimed at large enterprise customers. Apple is targeting theirs towards individual end users and their families. They aren't competing in the same space.
steelbrain|4 years ago
I spent the better half of a week trying to get it to work, ended up moving to Google Workspace instead.
crossroadsguy|4 years ago
For the rest I’d, as someone who gave it a try - almost their entire services suite including TV etc a thorough try, highly recommend to stay out.
Stay out even if they improve it (which I doubt) from its current state i.e. pathetic.
- Apple is a weird company but they are weird because they can afford to be weird in the way they are because they know their fan base (their majority/core users)
- Their software and services have revisions/major updates/upgrades tied with OS versions.
- Even across OS versions they so deliberately don’t add the most essential features and literally “hold back” as if they go completely deaf on user needs
- I believe it stems of a inferior software engineering prowess and a lack of confidence - that “let’s keep it for the next OS release” so that we announce on stage “For the first time in any iOS - you can control two SIMs separately - TrueSIM™ - or named something ridiculously absurd.
- They have repeatedly shown they’re not callous about user needs or feedback but they’re openly hostile to it.
- The “just works” smoke is very much cleared by now and they’re either just too incompetent or stupidly adamant still trying to ride the fan wave of “they know what we want” and fans giddily shoving everything down their own throats claiming as the best whatever Apple churned out. I skew towards the former though.
- Also they do not have real competition with other softwares, more so on iOS and iPadOS, unlike Android (which I develop for but am not a user of) you literally don’t have options of softwares for many basic usage.
- Now one can argue they like it that way - I don’t. They have anyway such a locked down App Store - not letting users choose browser, SMS apps etc is just a poor excuse that they can somehow get away with.
I would just treat them as a device seller and keep my software and services from other competent places. Besides I like my eggs in various baskets.
The last thing I want is my email from a provider which 100% coupled with devices from one manufacturer that is locked down like never before in history and their locking users out puts Google’s famous locking out to shame.
blitzar|4 years ago
If you believe the things you wrote - weird, institutionally dishonest, hostile to its customers and grossly incompetent why would you buy anything ever from them?
stillblue|4 years ago
netfortius|4 years ago
rnk|4 years ago
That's the most valuable feature of goggle mail and domain hosting to me.
yannikyeo|4 years ago
AnonC|4 years ago
achairapart|4 years ago
They're swiss based and this is their website:
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail/
rez9x|4 years ago
rekoil|4 years ago
james-redwood|4 years ago
dan_wood|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
jws|4 years ago
daviddavis|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
shaunpud|4 years ago
seanp2k2|4 years ago
rekoil|4 years ago
Bilal_io|4 years ago
7steps2much|4 years ago
thelittleone|4 years ago
Simplicitas|4 years ago
hughrr|4 years ago
I suspect apple will be producing another subscription model or extension to it to support these features once they’ve proven it in production for a bit.
vucetica|4 years ago
PeterWhittaker|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
I'm hoping shining a light on these pain points turns some heads at Apple so we end up with a better service and one more good competitor in the hosted email space -- if you don't mind it being Apple, of course. :-)
njhaveri|4 years ago
I tried many other mainstream forwarding options and settled on Pobox as the best overall option, and moved my personal domain over. It's working pretty well, flowing to my regular Gmail account and having aliases set up in Gmail.
littlecranky67|4 years ago
woodson|4 years ago
josephg|4 years ago
My mum's work email address changed and we changed the email address associated with her apple ID. She had no end of tiny bugs pop up - especially in the first couple of weeks after the change.
Apple's systems in general don't seem to cope well with email addresses changing or being deleted. I think lots of software engineers use email addresses as if they're an immutable primary key. This just isn't the case.
theginger|4 years ago
AnonC|4 years ago
With Apple focusing more on growing its services business to compensate for any saturation in the hardware market space, there’s some chance that the situation might improve for other platforms (but those would be Windows and Android, not Linux). But Apple already has about a 70% profit margin on its services. So it’s unlikely that other platforms will be prioritized in the next few years (it’s not in Apple’s DNA).
nvr219|4 years ago
_nhynes|4 years ago
AnonC|4 years ago
merlinscholz|4 years ago
rreichel03|4 years ago
tl;dr; Emails can only ever be registered with one iCloud account ever, even in the same Apple family
dfee|4 years ago
We’ve received a fair amount of links shared with us on Google Drive. Is there anyway to migrate off Google Apps AND retain access to those links?
Or, am I basically stuck paying for this software for the rest of my life?
mark_l_watson|4 years ago
Like using all e-mail services, I make periodic local backups in case I ever want to switch my domain to another service.
shaunpud|4 years ago
bredren|4 years ago
scim-knox-twox|4 years ago
h4waii|4 years ago
Completely off topic, but why do people think having a sticky header indicating how far "through" an article is, is worth disrupting the content for?
domlaut|4 years ago
Microsoft does hit a great middle ground -- but there's still far too little players IMO. Would enjoy if we also had Apple as a contender -- especially if they'll remain as big on their service businesses as they claim.
shimms|4 years ago
From what I read DKIM also isn’t offered on Family which is disappointing. Business plans get expensive quickly when you want Office apps as well.
lokimedes|4 years ago
AnonC|4 years ago
kevindong|4 years ago
domlaut|4 years ago
weikju|4 years ago
Me, I've experimented with migrating some of my domains from self-hosted to iCloud+, simply for the ease of management and reducing the headache from SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. It turns out I have a spurious DNS record that was causing all my headaches, which I had forgotten to remove from older experiments, and I didn't need to migrate to solve this.
In either case, it's a nice convenience feature. Despite the trend, and the HN-think, Apple DOES do things for power-users sometimes.
bredren|4 years ago
Offering custom domains for personal can link up to office documents and this can make its way into business use.
For small businesses already standardizing on Mac hardware, it’s natural they should want to get the privacy and in-ecosystem utility of an apple version of Gsuite.
dymk|4 years ago
voisin|4 years ago
rootusrootus|4 years ago
I'm just going to switch over to Fastmail (currently on an end-of-life'd gsuite setup).
StepBroBD|4 years ago
privacynerd99|4 years ago
[deleted]
imwillofficial|4 years ago
strontium_90|4 years ago
For my family's email needs, $12/user/month is a bit of a non-starter given the competition.