Using my own domain with iCloud email

Thanks Ergolad et al for your contributions to this thread. I am not teck savvy enough to do all the finageling so I would like a simpler solution.

Currently I am using mydomain.com with Google Apps and paying $4.xx per month. This allows me to appear to be sending from mydomain.com which is fine.

BUT .... the IMAP syncing is off and on and my "filters" don't work most of the time and the syncing seems off and changes made on OS or iOS (read, deleted, replied to, etc.) do not sync in a reasonable time if at all.

I need to continue to use Mail because I also use CRM program called Daylite which links all contacts to my Database. This is important as being a Psychotherapist I need to collect all communications with clients/patients in one place. So Daylite is "integrated with Mail", a great feature for me.

So I am between a rock and a hard place.....

Using Google IMAP/Mail/Daylite and having lousy mail sync or

Using iCloud/Mail/and being stuck with a @me, @icloud return address.

I hope I am making this clear. If only I could find a way to ralate Calendar Events to clients as I can with Daylite, I would switch to the most seemless means of organizing and syncing transparently and efficiently.

Any ideas?

Yes. Thats what I meant. Your own domain email hosted with www.domains.live.com. You get 50 free user ID's and they have free exchange capaility.

With google it does work using a different 'sent as' email ID, but only from the web interface. Not from your mobile device.

With outlook.com email id , it works using a different 'sent as' ID too, but a lot of emails don't get forwarded to outlook.com, which seems to be a rampant problem on outlook.com forums. Apparently outlook.com rejects email at its own will and doesn't inform the sender nor the user that it has done so.

Well I'll have to thoroughly test it and see if it is a solution for me. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the questions I posed regarding compatibility.

For those wondering, I did successfully set up my iPad 2 iOS 7.1 with my existing settings using iCloud as the conduit for my variety of e-mail addresses. I'm happy to report it worked just as it always has. There were a few frustrating moments, but they were due to entering settings incorrectly. Once I got that corrected everything is humming along.

I didn't want to get into a full test of how well Outlook.com Exchange integrates with iOS and OSX, but I briefly set up my Hotmail account using the Outlook.com option. It was pretty straight forward. I didn't have any mail in the account to play with because it all gets forwarded to iCloud and I just didn't want to get to far into it. I didn't notice any issues with folders having different names, but I did not see an Archive folder. Maybe because I hadn't technically archived anything yet for that new account?. When I tried to move an iCloud e-mail from another iCloud based account to my Hotmail Exchange Inbox to play with, it wouldn't allow me to on my iPad. Looks like you can't transfer mail between different account's folders with that setup. At least not from iCloud to Outlook.com. Even with IMAP I could do that. I sometimes do transfer mail from one account's inbox to another if I inadvertently give out the incorrect e-mail to someone, or they don't have my most recent one. That way I can keep all my pertinent emails organized under the account I want them in.

I like the sound of this Exchange thing though. And the fact that I've never actually given out an Apple e-mail address to anyone, or cared to, I'm not married to iCloud, just the functionality. I also don't ever really use webmail, but it'd be nice to have that work on Outlook.com. I can't send from my domains on iCloud.com. I'd honestly prefer a more straight forward approach to all this, but I've gotten fairly good at setting this up and the iCloud method works well for me now. When my e-mail hosting account is close to renewal time, I may consider taking the time to really investigate a switch.

If anyone has been doing this iCloud workaround and then moved their domains over to Outlook.com's Exchange solution, I'd love to hear about your experience.

steveschklar - This Outlook.com Exchange thing sound like a much simpler solution for you. If I were setting something new up I'd look into that first. There are a bunch of tutorials out there. Basically you just need to set up your e-mail domains with www.domains.live.com (Outlook.com), change the MX records for your domain with your host, and then setup those new hosted accounts on your Apple devices. (Back up all your mail to be safe.) It appears the latest version of Daylight's DMA (4.1) supports Exchange. Actually if I were still in admin work, I'd be totally interested in that product. Looks cool.

The outlook365 is completely transparent. I have 2 Macs an ipad an iphone and everything sysncs acroos all the devices, calanders, contacts, task, notes, mail. It is the best option to date I have found for using your own domain and it come with 25GB of mail storage and 5GB of OneDrive storage.

Sadness. Shortly after we tossed this idea around, MS quietly shut down free custom email domain support for Outlook.com. My GoDaddy email package is about to expire and I was thinking of trying this method. So much for that.

The good news is I've upgraded all my iOS devices to 7.1.2 and my computers to Mavericks, and my old tried and true iCloud method continues to chug along pretty well.

Maybe I'll look into Outlook365's paid options as an alternative since Godaddy is jacking up my pricing.

I know this is an old thread but it's the most relevant one I found in a search. Back to the original question, "Can I use my own email address with iCloud Mail?" I think the answer is yes.

In my domain control panel I forwarded my own email address to my iCloud email address.

On my iMac, Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts and then I set the outgoing SMTP server for iCloud Mail to use my own domain's SMTP server rather than Apple's server. It was already available in the selection menu because I had entered it as part of a POP account. You can't do this from System Preferences -> Internet Accounts or from Mail -> Accounts; they don't seem to really do much. You have to do it from Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts.

The result is that on my iMac I can receive emails to my own email address via iCloud, and when I reply they get sent through my own SMTP server and therefore originate from my own email address.

On my iPhone of course I also receive these emails via the iCloud account, and when I send a reply I can select my own email address as the sender from the composition window. It defaults to the iCloud address but I can select my other email addresses instead and they go through the corresponding SMTP server. Again, I had previously entered this server when I originally created POP accounts for myself. I may be able to select my own sending email as default although I haven't really looked into that yet.

So I'm open to explanations of why this isn't working as it seems to, but as far as I can tell mail sent to my own email address is being stored by Apple's SMTP servers and handled with iCloud Mail, while I can send replies that originate from my own address as well. Nothing I did is any kind of trick, so I have to assume this is a way that Apple intended us to use iCloud mail.

Hi Anton,

Thanks for the explanation, but in this case, do you also receive your mails on both accounts on all your devices?

I'm not able to select a "delete from server" setting anywhere at my domain host. An alias would do that, but than you don't have the smtp capabilities.

Anny suggestions on this?

Thanks!

Xavier

How are you sending from your domain host to iCloud? I changed my account to a forwarding account, which means that it does not stay on the server at all. I gather you are just copying it to iCloud instead, which means it also stays on the server. Essentially you would have both a POP version (the regular account) and an SMTP version (iCloud) of the same account. And I don't know what would get the messages off the server.

BTW I am not there yet with my mail setup. I'll come back to that after I test a few more things.

Okay thanks for letting me know if you get any further.

In my case, the issue is that if I use a forwarding account, it's no more than an alias. This means I'm not able to use it as an smtp account, only pop (or imap).

The search goes on I guess... .

Same here. If I set my account to 'Forwarding' then I can no longer send through it. This is a GoDaddy account. I will call them and see if they have any suggestions.

I think Apple Mail is flexible enough to do whatever we want it to do (use multiple alternative SMTP servers) but the host has to cooperate. In my case I want to have two different non-iCloud email addresses and be able to send from iCloud mail through either of those accounts' SMTP servers. GoDaddy's configuration doesn't seem to allow that.

Well, I still had a free google apps domain and that seems to do the trick for now... see link for steps to take. It works ok for me, except on Mac, I want Apple Mail to prevent syncing the Archive folder.

http://jonwestfall.com/2014/07/get-true-push-gmail-iphone-ios-device/

Have you tried stopping the sharing via IMAP in the Gmail preferences?

Hi Nik,

What exactly do you mean with the "sharing via IMAP"? Do you mean just disabling IMAP?

Thanks

Xavier

Think disabling IMAP is no good. This will generate errors in my OSX Mail app no? Will keep trying to update... .

So-

Are all these methods still working in Yosemite and iOS8?

It is unbelievable that this is so difficult to set up. It's a basic right, to choose one's identity. Is iCloud a service or an advert???

Jon