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Shared Email Address within a Custom Domain

G

Godel_I

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I have a custom domain which I use through Apple Mail/iCloud without any difficulty; it works like a charm. What I'd like to do is add an email address to that domain and share access to it with my spouse.

So, the address would have the format "meandmyspouse@customdomain.com," and we would both be able to access the Inbox via our iCloud mail accounts.

This is achievable, right?
 
Godel_I said:
This is achievable, right?
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I don’t think so. From what I understand, iCloud custom domain email addresses are treated like aliases for your iCloud email address… “one inbox” for all email addresses. Unless you and your spouse use the same iCloud account and share the “one inbox”, you won’t be able to access email sent to custom domain email addresses.
 
Just a quick look at the documentation leads me to believe that it's not like having a domain email hosted at Office 365 (for example) where you can add addresses for $4/month and then access those emails via Exchange on as many devices as you wish.

Easiest and cheapest would be to create a free Gmail (johnandjane.doe@gmail.com) set up as IMAP or free Outlook (johnandjane.doe@outlook.com) set up as Exchange.
 
Bigwaff said:
Yes. If possible to configure, would allow receiving email…. I assume OP is interested in sending email from the custom email domain as well. Perhaps I shouldn’t assume.
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Primarily, this will be read-only. We won't need to be able to send messages from the shared address.
 
BrianBaughn said:
Just a quick look at the documentation leads me to believe that it's not like having a domain email hosted at Office 365 (for example) where you can add addresses for $4/month and then access those emails via Exchange on as many devices as you wish.

Easiest and cheapest would be to create a free Gmail (johnandjane.doe@gmail.com) set up as IMAP or free Outlook (johnandjane.doe@outlook.com) set up as Exchange.
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If I take the Gmail or Outlook route, can my spouse and I use the Mail app to read the Inbox, or would we access it through the web-based interface?
 
Godel_I said:
If I take the Gmail or Outlook route, can my spouse and I use the Mail app to read the Inbox, or would we access it through the web-based interface?
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Both work fine with the Mail app. They should also work with Calendar and Contacts if you need either of those.

I think that Outlook (because of Exchange) would "push" emails immediately. Gmail is on "fetch" and sometimes comes in a little slower.

Also, as Outlook uses Exchange I think there's the old "can't move emails from an IMAP to an Exchange" iOS/iPadOS bugaboo that I experience with my Office 365 Exchange account. I have to do that on my Mac.

However, I use Google because of the calendar features. I have a Google account just for calendar and contacts and don't use the mail…as my domain email is hosted by Office 365.
 
Thanks to all who offered help with my question.

I ended up using Apple Mail's Rules feature to forward all incoming mail addressed to "myspouseandme@ourprivatedomain.org" to my spouse's Inbox. So far, so good, as we both get a copy of the incoming messages.

A bit of a kluge but solved the use case. Appreciate all of you...
 
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Technically, what you want to do is not possible because you get 1 set of MX records per domain and right now your MX records are pointed at the icloud email server, so all of the email that comes through that mx record goes to the icloud server and then the email addresses/inboxes are managed there.

Fucntionally, however I can think of a couple of solutions:
1) Slightly more challenging, but the cleanest solution would be to create a subdomain. so in this case you would have parnter1@customdomain.com and patner2@customdomain.com and point your MX for customdomain.com to Apples servers and create your mailbox there. Then create a subdomain for instance shared.customdomain.com ... then shared.customdomain.com would have it's own set of MX records that you would want to set up with email forwarding .. so for instance you sould have sharedmailbox@shared.customdomain.com forward to partner1@customdomain.com and partner2@customdomain.com

2) Not exactly the answer to your question but slightly easier would be to just register a second domain such as sharedcustomdomain.com and forward shared@sharedcustomdomain.com to your email addresses. this would cost slightly more $ but would be less config then option 1.

Namecheap provides free email forwarding. I have not tried the config mentioend in option 1 on namecheap but im curious if it works.

personally, I use option 2...

my wife uses a gmail account
i have a custom domain hosted throug icloud mail
and then my wife and i have a domain for some rental properties that we own.

my set up is that i have house1...n@rentaldomain.com forward to both of our email addresses and then i host the domain which is more related to my name on icloud and point my mx records there.

Please post back if you go with option1. im curious if it works !
 
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If you don’t actually need “shared” access (e.g. no need for one of you to see that the other has already actioned the email) then the rule method you’ve chosen is fine.

If you wanted truly SHARED access - you can see if it’s been read or replied to by the other person, for example - you could create a new Family Apple Account for the shared mailbox, and sign into that on both of your devices as a “secondary “ iCloud account. Then you’d literally both be using the same “mailbox” for that specific email.
 
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