Can I use iCloud Mail for business?

I am SO tempted NOT to respond to this, but can't help myself. Abraham, if all you wanted to do is forward your mail from one provider to iCloud, I congratulate you. But if you wanted to combine your iCloud account with your business domain email, so that you can receive and send from your domain using iCloud on your devices, then alas, forwarding alone will not solve your problem.

Roger is right, the web UI for iCloud will not currently allow for you to send from your own domain, but as you may have found, you can certainly forward (if your domain mail host allows this service) to any address you want to, iCloud included. Take care to make sure SPAM filters at your domain don't inadvertently snag mail though, or worse, copies build up, maxing out your hosting limits.

As for sending from your domain, spoofing outgoing SMTP servers, this is a bit more complex and I recommend you read the thread I mentioned. I have 3 iCloud accounts set up in Mail.app on my MacBook Pro, and in the iOS Mail app on my iPhone 6, iPhone 4S (currently acting as an iPod Touch) and an iPad 2. All three independently receive forwarded mail from domains other than iCloud, AND all three have their SMPT servers set to reply by default from their respective alternate domains. It's been pretty seamless. And I can report that the sent mail does indeed get stored in the iCloud Sent folder. Which I love.

I admittedly haven't had to set this up in a long while, and with my latest devices the settings just transferred over. It may be even easier now. I haven't tried it, but it use to be that you couldn't manually change the outgoing mail servers on an iCloud account, but tricking the applications by creating an IMAP account, you could. What you'd end up with was an iCloud account with editable outgoing SMTP settings.

I followed up just in case someone who actually wants a more complete solution happened to be reading this. The beauty of all this is you have the smooth integration of iCloud push, syncing all your email across devices with little delay and very reliably. The times I've used IMAP alone, things have been far from reliable and nowhere near synced. As for Exchange, the experimenting I did just didn't work as smoothly as iCloud using Apple applications: archiving, flagging, marking messages as replied/read/unread/forwarded, moving messages from one account to another, etc. Maybe if I worked on it more I could get Exchange to play the way I want, but I've not dedicate the time. What I have works for my needs.

Hope this helps clarify for those in need.

Ergolad has expanded on what has already been said. What it boils down to is:

You can usually set the domain's emails service to forward messages to the domain address on to iCloud.

On each individual device you can set iCloud mail up manually instead of having the system do it for you, and you set the incoming and outgoing servers up separately: incoming mail is using the iCloud server but outgoing mail uses the domain's outgoing (SMTP) server. Then you can choose the iCloud account in mail and you will by default send as from the domain address.

You can only do this on computer and iOS devices; you cannot change the outgoing server on the iCloud website. Obviously you would receive the forwarded email, but if you send a message from there it will show the @icloud.com address as the 'From' address.

Got it. Since I use Google Docs to host my business, I will do the following:

1) Set up my domain email to forward to my iCloud account

2) manually set up my IOS and MAC with:

1) iCloud email and password, but using incoming as iCloud server and outgoing as my google server

This means all email will come to iCloud. I can use my folders in iCloud, etc. one downside is Google then sees all my incoming emails since they host my domain and now all my outgoing emails since I will be using their outgoing server. The advantage is all email will show my personal domain versus the iCloud one.

I sure hope Apple starts hosting these domains. This is just too crazy!

You don't even need to set up your domain email in Mail.app. Just add it as an additional Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) for the iCloud account you set up. You'll see the option to "Edit SMTP Server List" at the bottom of the drop down menu that you mentioned. Set it up per your domain provider's instructions.

Personally I recommend associating a separate iCloud address to each domain email. You can sign up for multiple iCloud accounts. If you would like an iCloud only account, I'd dedicate one to just that and not muck that up with any personal/business domain stuff.

Abraham, there's no need to create Alias accounts to accomplish anything we've been discussing. As a matter of fact, doing so will prevent you from using those aliases as fully functional, standalone accounts in the future.

Perfect. Thanks Roger and Ergload. This made it super simple. I added the extra SMTP server, kept icloud and my current domain. Great solution. Thanks so much. Apple should make this a regular "product"!

Roger

One odd thing, since I added the Google account to Mail there are some icloud messages that go to my junk folder that aren't marked Junk. I tried everything including reseting junk settings, changing the setting to leave junk mail in the inbox, and so far nothing is working. I guess I could delete the google account from my Mail app since now all outgoing mail uses that SMTP server anyway. But it's nice to have it there in case I want to check the folders. Have you seen this before?

This action is probably taking place on the server - quite apart from the junk filter in your Mail application, there is a junk filter built into the iCloud mail server. I quote from their Help:

Click the Junk folder in the sidebar.

Select a message, then click the Not Junk button in the top right of the message window.

The message is moved to your Inbox. Subsequent email messages from the same sender are no longer automatically marked as junk.

Roger this has all worked very well. One new issue: somehow in my Mac Mail client the SMTP server was set back to icloud instead of my domain. Is there something that does that I am doing? Any way to put a check on it?

Should have added, has Apple said if they will do something similar to Google where they will let iCloud be used with your own domain?

I don't see why not; they do have parameters/maximum sizes (like most email providers do):

Mailbox size and message sending limits in iCloud - Apple Support