I have 2 email accounts, both are iCloud accounts. Used to have a gmail account to use as a backup but discontinued it awhile ago; too much junk email, particularly for an account I rarely even used.
There’s a problem today wiCloud email, hadn’t been reported until I called about it. I can receive email from everywhere EXCEPT from an iCloud email address. If I send an email from my iCloud email, it shows as Sent but no one receives it. Apple verified the problem after working w/me but said it probably won’t be fixed til tomorrow; that “section” doesn’t work weekends.
Realize now that I should have another backup email to use if/when there’s an iCloud outage. Don’t want another gmail account, don’t want yahoo for the same reasons.
Checked w/Verizon - my ISP - as I thought I had a Verizon email address that I never used. Turns out I don’t, Verizon stopped issuing Verizon email addresses awhile ago & they can’t create one.
Any suggestions for a free or low cost email option other than gmail or yahoo? Obviously would prefer free as I will rarely use it but willing to pay a reasonable amount for a secure email account.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I’m partial to fastmail.com, but a free alternative is to use something like gmail with an unguessable email address. And then never post that email address in any place that it can be found. That will limit the spam, at least until there’s a breach at some site you used it to open an account with.
For example, Y~B$QD}9E$Q|cX\6tiYsz6@gmail.com. But don’t use that one.
Thank you. I’ll look into Fastmail. My previous gmail address was fairly complicated but I still got loads of junk mail thru it, even tho I very rarely used it. So gmail’s definitely not an option.
For free and very secure, try ProtonMail.
As for the email problem you described, I’ve experienced a similar, but not identical, problem these last few days…
I don’t use iCloud email myself; I have my own domain and use a paid hosting service. But on 2 occasions, my mom sent me emails from her iCloud email on her Mac. I replied from my hosted email and then she replied to my replies. But I never got her replies. I’m quite puzzled, and plan to ask my host for help tomorrow.
Thank you, I’ll look into ProtonMail. Years ago, when I had my own business, I had my own domain and used a paid hosting service. When I dissolved my company, I dropped the domain & have just been using iCloud mail ever since.
When I reported the issue this morning, I was told there weren’t any other reports of the problem & iCloud was fine. But while I was on the phone w/Apple, the advisor noted that other people were reporting the issue, guess I was “the first.”
That’s when I realized I needed another type of backup email, had not occurred to me before, have been using only iCloud mail for many years.
I did think about setting up a domain name & looking for a hosting service but I’ve been away from that sort of thing for so long, I didn’t even know where to start; the amount of work to do that feels overwhelming.
I agree with Michael…it’s worth paying the small annual fee for a paid email backup where you are not the product. And I’ve got my own domain associated with our old back in the BBS days original email account as well as some Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, and iCloud addresses. Normally all just redirect to my domain email account but all the others keep a copy and I can login separately if I really need to.
Don’t mind paying a small fee for an email account; just haven’t looked into that for so many years I didn’t know where to start. For the most part, iCloud has worked smoothly for me for a very long time. But now that it’s temporarily not working, I realize I need more than iCloud. Guess I’ve been a bit complacent, time to get my act together.
Any other suggestions anyone has will be appreciated.
Fastmail is undoubtedly nice but there’s no getting away from those prices. If you want to optimize for cost, and don’t mind trading off some more obscure functionality (but really, it’s still more than enough) then check out Purelymail. It reminds me of an earlier age of email hosting … just be aware that it’s “beta” (in the best tradition of other services) and it’s currently a one-man band. The big missing feature compared to FM is iOS push notifications, but if that’s acceptable to you, do give it some consideration. I have recommended it to others looking to get out of Big Tech’s orbit, with success.
https://purelymail.com/
Thank you, will look at Purelymail as well.
Another vote for ProtonMail. I have a free account and I receive no spam from Proton. I rarely use it but plan to use it more. I also have a free Proton VPN.
“it’s currently a one-man band”
This is a red flag to me. The big email services do not like the little or even medium sized operations and will not talk to them about problems with delivery in either direction. Running a mail server as a service for anyone who signs up is somewhat more than a full time job, as is the customer service. Burn out is more common than turning it into a successful business unless he already has funding for more employees in the near future. 10-15 years ago when internet standards orgs still made the rules, it would have a decent chance, but in the current climate where giant-corps make up their own ‘standards’ often intended to exclude non-giant-corps, that chance has withered considerably.
ProtonMail is reasonable for a free light usage account. I find the interface awkward, and it’s web mail only–their first focus is end to end encryption, so you can’t connect to it via imap with a regular mail client. For paid accounts ($4-12/month) they have their own desktop client. I use a free account as a recovery address and for occasional problem solving and haven’t had any trouble with it, but I wouldn’t enjoy it for more intensive use (ymmv).
fastmail.com’s $60 per year is dirt cheap from the point of view of running my own mail servers for a few decades. They have a long track record, support is responsive when needed, the online help is mostly quite good, and as a bonus it includes file space, caldav and carddav for calendars and contacts (syncs with ithings), server-side rules, aliases, no ads, privacy (no scraping your mail to sell ads), your own domains, and it can fetch mail from other accounts. You can use it with any imap client, though I like the web interface and mostly use that. I do have mail.app on a mac backing it up, and it works fine with ios mail.
If you want your own domain name and don’t already own the name, you can register a domain through fastmail and everything should be seamless. Their domain prices seem reasonable–a little cheaper than gandi.net in a spot check. I set up several domains that I have registered elsewhere, and it was quite easy to follow their excellent detailed and personalized instructions (copy this into the MX record field and that into a TXT field), but that does involve changing the domain records. But it’s not any harder than any other kind of web form.
I concur. About 15 years ago we ran our own mail servers. At stages we ran Apple OS X Server Mail and at other times CommunigatePro. Communigate was great but complex and expensive. OS X Mail went the way of OS X Server but it was easy to use and cheap.
We ended up with MS Exchange. For a bare email account it’s cheap and it’s been very reliable. Having said that, it makes Communigate look simple and the support is woeful - and we’re a company.
A quick look on the MS website seems to suggest you can get a free outlook account - might be worth a look. *Edit to say the Outlook accounts are the rebranded Hotmail accounts.
Mail.com has been our independent email provider for almost three decades. Premium support is excellent and annual cost per account is quite reasonable. iCloud mail is secondary for both business and personal correspondence.
A major advantage has been constant email addresses as our network providers have changed from DSL to cable interest.
Have you tried proton? (https://proton.me)
Jack
Thanks very much, ProtonMail seems to be the front runner.
One man band concerns me as well. Appreciate your comments. Looking at Fastmail & ProtonMail.
Not yet but definitely will take a look at it. Thank you.
If you’re expecting to use Proton from the stock mail app on macOS or iOS, you’ll need a paid account for MacOS (to use it with Proton’s Bridge application) and won’t be able to on iOS or iPadOS - there you can only use Proton’s app.
Other than that, Proton mail is fine for me (I do have a paid account.)
Nobody has mentioned Microsoft’s outlook.com service. My only issue with them is that I’m frequently asked to re-enter credentials on all of my devices. Otherwise, though, it’s not a bad free mail server option. In the past I’ve used Gmail as backup mail accounts but Google’s insistence on using their mobile app (either Gmail or YouTube) as a two factor authentication method is turning me off of them. That said, Gmail does IMO have the best spam filtering around, even compared with paid accounts. I’m with a previous comment; if you can get by Google pushing you to use a mobile app to authenticate logins, I’d just create a new Gmail account if spam has become such an issue. (My secondary Gmail account has never been used to authenticate on any web page/account online other than Google and gets spam very infrequently, if not never, and I’ve used it for many years. I do have it set as a secondary mail address on my Apple ID in case I lose access to my primary email address but otherwise that’s it.)
I am now using Fastmail as my primary address and it’s fine, but seems expensive as a secondary mail address.
@sf.ross I sent you a private message on here over the weekend. Hoping you saw it. ;-)
Just received it a moment ago, just before this message came thru. Thank you very much, appreciate your help.