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iCloud+ to Let iCloud Mail Users Personalize Their Email Domain Name
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This is potentially exciting, but I am being cautiously optimistic. Would love to use my personal domain as my AppleID for email, but with previous experiences with Apple and the iCloud service, I will wait to see it to believe.
As a .mac user, one that I created in college, I've wanted to change the email for years... after all, I created it in college lol. I can use nameidontwant@mac.com, nameidontwant@me.com, and nameidontwant@icloud.com as my default for email/sign in, however I've never been able to change it to nameiwouldlike@icloud.com.
This has been such a point of frustration that I just use my Microsoft account for personal things. For example, things like sending out calendar invites from my phone with the cringe college email alias at the front of the invite is beyond frustrating.
As a .mac user, one that I created in college, I've wanted to change the email for years... after all, I created it in college lol. I can use nameidontwant@mac.com, nameidontwant@me.com, and nameidontwant@icloud.com as my default for email/sign in, however I've never been able to change it to nameiwouldlike@icloud.com.
This has been such a point of frustration that I just use my Microsoft account for personal things. For example, things like sending out calendar invites from my phone with the cringe college email alias at the front of the invite is beyond frustrating.
how and when will we know when we are on iCloud+ - have been waiting for this for years. Push email will be a while new feeling for my business communication 
Good to hear. You notice the same vice versa as well?
For ex, what would drive me nuts was working at my Mac or iPad, dealing with email, and then picking up my phone and seeing all the email on the lock screen as new unread items still.
Yeah, well, I'm old-school, you can score my email without the benefit of newfangled things like SPF and DKIM and you'll like it or elseonly if you want to do SPF it gets tricky and with DKIM it comes close to impossible in most cases
Though I have thought about moving my email (back-end) to FastMail... I might hold off a bit longer now and see how all this plays out.
Exactly why I use Fastmail. AFAIK, it's the only email service that supports iOS Mail push notifications properly.
It's actually quite magical, in fact. It's so fast that as soon as I read a message on my MacBook or iPad, I can usually see the notifications disappear from my Lock Screen on my iPhone sitting beside me.
I do really hope Apple brings this to iCloud Mail. I've always been perplexed that it hasn't been there since the beginning, but then again I come from a pre-iPhone era when Blackberries roamed the earth. I feel like most people don't care about these things nearly as much (as evidenced by the number of people I know who have a four-digit number persistently hovering over their Mail icon 😏).
$19/year (it can be less other places) is not much to pay to have a permanent email address. No more having to tell people "oh, I've changed ISPs/jobs/schools/whatever, and my new address is ____". You can have one email address that is your canonical address for the rest of your life, and, bonus, it can be something of your choosing that is short, memorable, and easy to communicate to people (no more having an address that includes a random 4 digit number). I've had one for at least 10 years, and it makes things much simpler.
That is coming in iOS 20, when there is a complete redesign of the mail app. Apple appreciates your business and ask that you please be patient.
You are right. $19 isn't huge. I pay more for Fantastical. My current main email accounts are iCloud based. I am trying to ascertain the benefit of using this new feature in that light.
This makes zero sense. Unless someone owns the domain, you can’t use it. So the paying bloke is the one giving you access to use it, whether that is yourself or some company.
So if the company owns it and chooses to sell it, yes your email would get bumped for the paying bloke.
If you own it and sell it, then yes again you would get bumped by the paying bloke.
paying bloke rules so again as I said, get rights to your own domain now or quickly after this goes live in order to make sure you are the paying bloke with the rights to make the decisions on the domain.
You don't "end up" with a domain name, you purchase one (it's more like a lease or subscription, because you're paying for a fixed period of time and have to renew). There's no way to use the domain until you've purchased it. It just doesn't work like that. And it's first-come first-served.
(Technically, you "buy" - register - some new, unused domain name, and aside from the registration record, what you get is that the associated TLD - top-level domain, like .com or .net - gets an entry in their database that says requests for acme.com will yield IP address 1.2.3.4, or whatever number you tell them - this can be the IP address of a server you own, or a hosting service that you pay to handle these details. There are also multiple different addresses in the table, associated with acme.com, for different kinds of things, one notable one is an MX record - for Mail eXchange - which tells where email for that domain should be sent. And it sounds like Apple is getting into the business of allowing MX records to be pointed at their servers and accepting email for these third-party domains.)
If you bought acme.com (as an example), and then ACME Corp came along and wanted it... they could offer you money for it. They could additionally offer some sort of deal where, say, "you@acme.com" still gets redirected to your iCloud account (something that their IT department would work out), but all other use of the domain (like for a website and their corporate email) would go to them (technically, at that point, your email would actually be delivered to them and then automatically forwarded to your iCloud email address).
They can't just take the domain without your permission, unless perhaps they could convince a judge that you obtained it fraudulently to "hold it ransom" from them... or, say, you're ACME's competitor, and you were using the acme.com to host a convincing looking but fake ACME company website that proudly proclaims ACME Corp hates puppies and likes Hitler. They might convince a judge that that was fraudulent.
But otherwise, you register it, and it's your's (as long as you keep renewing the domain every year).
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It makes zero sense because I know nothing about how domain names work.
Thankfully, a few blokes explained it to me, so I am no longer ignorant on the topic (which is not the same as being educated on it, but better than nothing).
This is delightful and reminds me of the early days of the internet when there was more of a “I don’t see why we can’t do that” feeling.
Heh, probably one of the earliest online subscription products … other than maybe AOL and Compuserve 😀
To make matters worse, domain names were free until the mid-90s, when the domain registry was handed over to a private company, Network Solutions. They began charging upwards of $100 for domain registrations, although I seem to recall that got dropped to around $70 for two years after some kind of legal fight. I think that’s what I paid for my first .com/.org/.net domain names back in ‘98, although registration was a much more complicated process back then too.
Domains have always been "a subscription", going back to the very first .com domains, and it makes sense, as it's a service with continuing costs (literally "answering the phone" the 17 billion times a browser or email client or whatever says, "what's the IP address of acme.com"? - that doesn't just happen by magic). It's a subscription in the same way that electricity is (which doesn't just magically come out of the wall outlet).
(Sorry, I spent decades helping run a network with many tens of thousands of machines, providing all the networking services, and having lots of people not understand that it didn't just happen by magic, and the reason that it nearly always Just Worked was because of a bunch of people working very hard to keep it that way.)
Once they got rid of the part where you had write them into your will and submit a brain tissue sample along with the paperwork, and the prices went down, suddenly everyone wanted a domain.
Haha, yup. I also remember how much more paperwork and justification was involved when the InterNIC was still run by the government.
I still have the old emails sitting in my archives, circa 1998-2002 of the old email-based host registration templates one used to have to send in to make all the registration stuff happen, PGP-signed and all 😀 ....ah, the nostalgia 😂
I am so excited for this. I have tried GSuite (No push email) and M365 (Doesn't support other email accounts) over the years and didn't like either of them. This is what I had been waiting for all this while.
I upgraded one of my phones to iOS 15 and at least on the phone, there's no such option, yet.
On a related note, http://beta.icloud.com's mail section has been updated already with a new look and feel. "Aliases" is now "accounts" to prepare for this new feature, I believe.
Cannot wait.
I upgraded one of my phones to iOS 15 and at least on the phone, there's no such option, yet.
On a related note, http://beta.icloud.com's mail section has been updated already with a new look and feel. "Aliases" is now "accounts" to prepare for this new feature, I believe.
Cannot wait.
Domain Hosting will be for your website, storage space for webpages etc. (your www.xyz.com)
Domain Name Registration is the xyz.com ownership, and registration into DNS (these are A Records, possibly CNAME)
Email Hosting is for your email (MX records in DNS, storage space, and mail server)
Your domain can, and usually is spread over several servers.
If everybody is reading this right, this is email hosting from icloud (using your registered domain name, so it would be MX Records are pointing to icloud mail servers). You would log into icloud as normal, but mail will be set up with your domain, so you can send and receive.
You would still need to be involved with Network Solutions for Domain Registration and Domain Hosting, but Email Hosting will be resolved by Apple.
I do have a suspicious feeling that this will be just more aliases so you can send email from icloud as your domain email xyz@xyz.com , something which people have been asking for, for some time.
I believe it will be same as Outlook Premium/M365 or GSuite. You will still pay for the domain name, but you won't pay for the hosting anymore, as your email will now be hosted on iCloud.
You will point your NS or MX records from your domain towards iClown's servers and be good to go.
Yes I was also thinking this is a possibility (but if it is the case, Apple’s wording is really unclear).
I’d be OK with it actually, as long as I can set iCloud to always use the alias by default and never expose the iCloud address to anyone.
I do wonder if this will appear directly in the iOS 15 settings or if it's something that will have to be setup on the iCloud web portal.
I suspect this depends largely on how easy Apple makes it to set up. Since Apple doesn't tend to build features exclusively for tech-savvy users, I very strongly suspect there's going to be a partnership with some domain provider to allow users to purchase a new domain name and get it up and running with as few clicks as possible. Otherwise, it's going to be a really niche feature.
After all, this is clearly for families, not for businesses, and as we can already see from some of the responses in this thread, most people will have no idea how to set this up, and are going to get in way over their heads. Registering a domain and updating MX records is something that's so trivial for most of us that it's easy to forget that there's plenty of room for things to go wrong for users who aren't familiar with this. Apple is going to have to make this as bulletproof as possible.
It wouldn't even entirely surprise me if Apple decided to set up as a domain registrar and host those domain names on its iCloud servers. It would, after all, be the only way to truly guarantee the kind of seamless user experience that Apple generally insists on for its customers.
My bigger concern is that they might only offer an option to register and set up domains through their own service or partner, much like Outlook.com did the last time around with GoDaddy.
Good catch. It definitely does look like this is the case, although at this point it's still only allowing for aliases, there's clearly more to it.
In fact, the whole iCloud Mail UI looks like it's gotten a fresh coat of paint. "Vacation" has now become "Auto Reply" but "Rules" appears to have disappeared. I'm hoping this is simply because Apple hasn't finished redesigning that particular section of the preferences yet — or perhaps plans to move it elsewhere — rather than a hint that they're going to take server-side rules away. While I highly doubt they'd do something like that, I wouldn't put it past them, especially if they're planning to introduce more advanced rules on the iOS side.
Very unclear. I kind of ruled that out as soon as I saw the reference to "invite family members to use the same domain," as there's be little need for Apple do to this with a simple email forwarding configuration, as external addresses forwarding into iCloud would still need to be validated before they can be used.