Custom domain names are coming to iCloud mail with iCloud+
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
> There’s no word on if this will require Family Sharing or if you’d have the ability to invite others outside of your family that have not been added to your Apple Family configuration.
My guess is that this will be rolled out as part of family sharing to keep it simple (at least for Apple).
> Of course, this announcement could eventually pave the way for Apple to offer business and school email over iCloud as a direct competitor to Google and Microsoft.
I strongly doubt that. I don’t think Apple would get into this space anytime soon. If it did, then it could be as a complete online office suite combined with email.
I am happy with ProtonMail, but since so few people use ProtonMail, the end to end encryption features is not that valuable. With some reservations, I mostly trust Apple, and it would be good having another privacy preserving email option.
I'm not saying Google or Yahoo is better, I'm saying that it sounds silly to say you Trust Apple.
You've probably heard of Edward Snowden, this is what he uncovered.
And yeah for profit corporations make money. Its unethical to advertise privacy and do the opposite.
Maybe this is the human brain trying to rationalize your past behavior in speech and it just sounds silly.
Also, in practice, Apple offers objectively much better privacy than Microsoft or Google do. For example, for over a decade now, iCloud Mail aliases let you have completely different addresses tied to your login, instead of exposing your primary address like YourRealAddress+UselessAlias@gmail.com
Does Apple have better security than Microsoft? They advertise that too, but every other week there's a Apple 0 day exploit.
Does Apple make you "Think different"? But make everyone conform to the same apps, web browser, hardware, etc....
I'd be extremely careful not to take marketing/psychology tricks as fact.
Ideally I should be able to generate for you a single GUID when we meet (e.g. by a QR code).
I should be able to grant a privilege to you for calling/texting/mailing me. You can call me with it, you can message me, you can mail me - but you never get any other info through that system (nor do I for you).
If I ever want to be done with you I delete the GUID and the operator removes the link and declares the GUID out of service.
How has Apple and/or Google not already built this?
Should stalking victims really be forced to uproot every part of their digital life to get rid of creeps or spammers? It’s ridiculous in 2021 that this isn’t standard.
And I think you may be overdoing the contrariness. E-Mail is one of the few open standards still existing, and with the advances of spam filters, it is really not that bad.
If you have my e-mail address, then you have a means to contact me - even if I don’t want you to.
Sure, I can block you, I can ignore you or I can trust that my spam filter will catch your e-mails, but what if you’re malicious? You can circulate my e-mail to any number of spam lists that I’ll have to receive rubbish from in perpetuity.
HME works for that, but I’m still stuck giving the same phone number to everyone. Phone numbers are even worse in that I can’t just ignore a call from you (save for declining all calls from withheld or unknown numbers, at which point my phone could be likewise getting called constantly if you were maliciously circulating my details).
The notion that the means by which I contact you is the same as how your friend John or cousin Sarah or even your parent/kids/spouse contacts you is insane.
We have two systems where you need to arrange with everyone you know to use new details because one single person that had your details is being nasty. And you’ll have to do it all again if they find out your new ones.
It’s not at all how you would design a communication system if you were to start over.
Something like Hide My Phone Number would be a big help, but wouldn’t work with the existing phone network as you’d need to make far longer phone numbers than the standards support (essentially a number for Apple/Google then a routing GUID for the contact if you wanted to built it on top of the phone network).
I’d like to see Apple and Google make a standard to push to replace phone numbers with something like this that can sit inside the dialer so it’ll handle it transparently as if it were a normal call.
> Sure, I can block you, I can ignore you or I can trust that my spam filter will catch your e-mails, but what if you’re malicious? You can circulate my e-mail to any number of spam lists that I’ll have to receive rubbish from in perpetuity.
I use a few catchall domains for this.
Sure, people can still circulate the email address I give humans, but I can easily create filters to send website email addresses to spam.
Wouldn’t this utterly undermine the privacy features in Hide My Email?
Example: If my e-mail addresses are me@mailboxman.com and ghj5628@mailboxman.com then combining my MX records with the domain name yields my identity (or at least a very close contact) across all of the proxy e-mails I use for privacy.
It’s essentially offering an easy way to unmask email.
And while I am hoping to switch to Apple Mail on my Mac w the new MacOs, I kinda need a web application as fast and swifty as gmail for search.
My concern would be that Apple keeps sticking with the UX of their Numbers and Pages applications which have never sat well with me. I want them to do a copy of word or docs and excel or sheets.
I need a web version of Google docs and sheets that is as good or superior to what gsuite has. Numbers and Pages are not it.
My goal would be to move completely away from Google. I have no problem going all in on Apple.
I’ve tried Microsoft office’s solution and it’s so messy with its weird domains and logins, attempts to work w the installed apps. I’m looking for non-infiltrated versions of the gsuite apps.
For example, most parts of iCloud are missing on Android, and their iCloud client for Windows has been broken for months or even years. Its log complains about launching iCloudDrive-AppX.exe while the install directory doesn't contain any executables with a "-AppX.exe" suffix. So no file syncing for me on Windows, I guess.
Having client site updates tied to major macOS/iOS releases is also sometimes causing strange issues if I still want to use older versions of macOS and iOS.
The happy path is only using devices from Apple and always staying on their latest OS release. No idea how attractive this new feature is for people who already use custom domains because they don't want to be tied to a single provider.
This is an understatement. The company continues to set the bar for security and data privacy across the entire stack.
RE staying within recent OS and devices for a happy path, I’m already fully on board with this. I update iPhone every year and my oldest machine is a 2018 MBA.
I think Apple does a better job supporting older equipment than other companies, and deprecates mostly to make valuable pushes forward.
If they were a little more considerate towards their power-users and developers, I could probably loop a Mac in for ~60% of my daily workflow. Nowadays though, I'd rather just use an OS that lets me do 95% of the stuff I do without compromise.
Just this past week:
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/os-x-lion-mountain-lion...
From the article:
Apple has kept OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion available for customers who have machines limited to the older software, but until recently, Apple was charging $19.99 to get download codes for the updates.
As of last week, these updates no longer require a fee, and can be downloaded from the OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion support documents on Apple's website.
Mac OS X Lion is compatible with Macs that have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and 7GB storage space.
Mac OS X Mountain Lion is compatible with the following Macs:
iMac (Mid 2007-2020)
MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (Early 2009)
I’m aware of alternatives, none really justify the switching cost for me.
I'm one of many families that share a tld much more widely than any 'family sharing' group could accommodate, up to and including acquaintances from the internet.
It would be awesome if this became more common.
Redirecting emails doesn't work great though, Gmail marks a lot of incoming emails as spam, I assume signatures don't match after redirection.
Nowadays, with software like Mail-In-A-Box, it’s as easy as one click install and few DNS settings.
Although, I do concede in some rare occasions, not everything goes well.
The thing that seems to be almost impossible to have with self-hosting is iOS push.
What I don't like with self-hosting is that I can't really self-host my mail. It'll run in VPS which kind of defeats the purpose of self-hosting. I have my home server, but setting up PTR record is impossible (for reasonable money) with my home ISP. Also I guess that my home IP address will not have good reputation.
And as I can't really self-host my mail, I just decided to delegate it to fastmail. I had my share of fun setting up postfix/dovecot/spamassassin, it was not that hard, just took some time, and I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to continue.
Some people I know self-host receiving emails, since the largest hassle there is configuring a spam filter.
Most people shouldn't self-host an SMTP server to send emails.
I do. Many other people I know do. It's not hard and it's gotten easier.
>it's very hard to get your mail delivered consistently
The only place I've actually struggled to get mail delivered to is hotmail. Almost everyone deals with this though and very few people in my country use it now.