How does it handle the scenario where the sender changes the domain they originate from? It may seem a bit unusual, like when a company rebrands (think of like Facebook originally sending from facebook.com, but then sending from meta.com later on).
1) a button to release the lock and allow the next sender to lock it again (only works for renames like you mention, facebook.com -> meta.com but not for apple.com and icloud.com sending together).
2) A button to manually add related domains. This is too much work because users can't guess new domains easily. I had betterstack.com email me as that and also as betterstackhq.com.
3) Allow up to 3-5 domains and let users block them manually. I feel this option is what permanent inboxes are for -- Clova already has an option to block entire senders (the whole domain or just a user).
4) Plugin some logic or AI in the backend to help categorize things together and understand that betterstack.com and betterstackhq.com are the same thing, apple.com, icloud.com etc are related, etc.
Anything else?
What's the difficulty in letting someone manually add more domains, or replace the existing domain explicitly without going through a "release inbox, and the next email can claim it again" dance?
I really like this idea, but only in theory right now.
So if I have have the inbox for Facebook.com email, then I notice unsorted messages coming from meta.com, I can merge this into the Facebook inbox. You can probably guess and recommend the correct merge because they’ll inbox in the To: line is already known.
I think if you’re centralizing the data for merging across all users, you can really get smart about recognizing or train an agent on that info.
I don’t think you should ever totally trash an email though. This will lose you users over time. Put them in a list/folder. Similar to how there are Junk and Spam folders where flagged emails get put. The user still gets to have those emails in case they need them or a false flag occurs.
met someone a few weeks ago. They said their email address is @<german ISP>.de but half the time they're sending from @icloud.com, I guess because they have an phone from Apple and don't understand the settings
I volunteer at a library where people can come with tech questions. Just last week, someone asked to help sort out their email addresses because they have various, from Microsoft, from an ISP, and because they have an Apple phone of course Apple also pushed an icloud address onto them that they didn't want
Seems quite common to have a second sending address with how Apple is pushing its lock-in (email addresses are some of the hardest things to migrate). Though, also without that, I tend to think people typically migrate their primary email address at least once or twice in a lifetime, not counting business emails that are sometimes also allowed for reasonable amount of private use (not saying that's a good idea but people do it). Not that unusual
Who cares?
FWIW I use my free iCloud email account with my custom domain since Apple (unlike Google) offers that as a free service. However, I just forward all email to my GMail address and use a custom reply-to in GMail so it _seems_ like I'm using the custom domain in both directions.
Doesn't Apple helpfully offer logging in with their email address constantly? At any rate, they were receiving emails on it and I don't think the user knew how to add an email address. They couldn't find their email client's account settings in iOS, but they struggled with several inboxes in the email client.
I assume that when you start using the device (since that requires Apple account tying) they create a new 'free' email address and provision it onto your devices. From what I later found online, indeed Apple has separate settings for their cloud offerings as compared to when you buy it from a competitor, which afaik is anticompetitive but until all countries get around to sending desist notices... apple does what apple does best
ahem, didn't they originally send from thefacebook.com ? (back when facebook.com was owned by someone else)