Apple has yet to demonstrate competence in services, and has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence in them. Like I said in my other posting, while it'd be interesting to play with as a throwaway, it's not a service I'd put anything important through.
Well for starters, it's orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else offering the same feature.
Their push notification service flawlessly processes a billion notifications per second.
Hard to imagine Apple would offer this without handling domain registration. People would be upset with Apple if their domain registration lapsed. I get occasional spam emails telling me I need to renew my domain from another service and Apple wouldn't want to get caught in the middle of that either.
if you set the MX than they need to give you an admin-console to manage the domain (e.g. a catch-all address).
It's a niche feature, and I'd suggest that 80% of people who would want to use it will already have an existing domain.
Why? Do people also get upset with Apple if they don't pay their power bill, and the power is cut off, or if they don't pay for their internet or mobile phone service, and that gets cut off?
You know there are more TLD's than just .com right? There are over a thousand TLDs now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
You'd still need to pay for the domain fee, but yes you could use iCloud for the email hosting part.
What?
... are you talking about automatic email forwarding to an iCloud address? You can do that now.
I… probably also want to see it run for a month error-free before pointing my MX records direct at Apple’s servers, but this has great potential for simplifying my email routing,
Yeah, they really need to bring in account merging with this feature. Otherwise I'll be in the same boat as you. I'll have two iCloud accounts:
The problem is when you then send email, it’s from a different address. That’s not great for people trying to work with you and ultimately I don’t think it’s a very good solution for doing business. I wouldn’t trust email I had sent to “yourbusiness.com” that then was responded via iCloud.com. Customers will potentially have multiple contact cards for you as a result too which may be off putting and cause contact details to be missed.
But you can’t assign just part of the email addressing for a domain to Apple. If you are foo@example.com, and you direct your MX record to Apple‘s servers, which seems to be what they’re talking about here, what with Apple also letting family members be bar@example.com and such, then if Apple doesn’t have a field somewhere for “and optionally redirect all other email the domain receives to X”, then the catch-all capability goes away. I don’t use this, but some do. What I do use is a handful of aliases in one of my domains (lists@example.com for some mailing lists, and things like that). It remains to be seen precisely what Apple offers.
Your first sentence states as a fact something that doesn’t have to be that way. You can have multiple outgoing SMTP servers and route your responses through the same server that’s forwarding your mail to iCloud, and use your business address on outgoing email that way.
It pushes changes for me, I open a new message on my phone and I see it be marked as read on my Mac usually within seconds.
It depends. Do you own the apple.com domain?
Do we actually know whether the 0.99/month plan will include all of the new features?
So? It's possible they'll support that feature, or it's possible they won't. Catch-All email addressing isn't some universal thing that's part of the RFC's covering email delivery.
Apple already offers up to 5 email aliases with regular iCloud email, and you can combine those with the + operator to create unlimited ones (i.e. I use an alias just for spam, but then combine it with the + so I get like myspamname+macrumors@icloud.com.
