I’m not sure what qualifies as “loads” of junk mail or how long ago you used Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, but I haven’t seen excessive spam with any of those free providers across quite a few accounts in quite a while.
Unless you are using a relatively simple or common email ID (the part before the @ sign), I’d wonder if there isn’t some other issue at play. What exactly do you use your “backup” email account for? If you use it for ecommerce or mailing lists, it’s very hard to avoid spam unless you spend some effort on tweaking the provider’s spam settings, and that goes for just about any provider.
When I had the gmail account, I used it as a backup for my iCloud email; only sent an email from the gmail account maybe twice/year at the most. Never used it for mailing lists, shopping, etc. I very rarely logged into the account, I had it set up so that anything sent to that account was automatically forwarded to my iCloud account. Even w/that limited amount of use, and a fairly complicated email ID, I would receive at least 10 junk emails/day that were addressed to the gmail account. It wasn’t so much that the junk mail itself was an issue - although it was irritating - it just reinforced to me the fact that Google does not respect my privacy & is not secure.
When using Google (search engine) I never log in w/any ID.
I know I can’t prevent most junk mail & I can live w/that. But when I feel a company is infringing on my privacy, I can cease to use its services.
I was never a big Facebook user either but when it got to the point that FB was too much “in my face” - in spite of my very strict privacy settings - I closed my account. Don’t use any other social media.
I’m sure much of my attitude about these things is due to my age. Guess I miss a lot of the anonymity from years ago; people only knew things about you that you specifically chose to share.
I agree that the current landscape for smaller mail operators has ossified considerably and is very austere, but I think fatalism is over-egging it. Clearly, you can still self-host, and the way to do it on easy mode is to route all your outgoing mail through Amazon SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun or whatever. Big corps still need to interoperate with the wider Internet, and administration is largely a compliance exercise (i.e. following Internet standards dominated by the big cats) followed by the occasional complaint to Microsoft, because of course they have to be special and require network operators to swear an oath of fealty that they shalt not abuse. Not to suggest in any way that things couldn’t be better, i.e. like they were in The Good Old Days™ when all you needed was a DNS hostname for the machine that sent and received mail, but honestly, I get more trouble from smaller operators determined to do stupid things like block all mail coming from various geographies, or from “non-compliant” (i.e. dynamic) ranges, etc. Frankly in that context, you’ve got far better odds of reaching most of the sites you actually care about through a small shop like Purelymail than you would running on an in-house mail server somewhere.
But, ultimately, it’s just a suggestion and you have to make the risk determination yourself. PM is a good choice for people who would otherwise self-host, but don’t really want to, IMO, and as I say, their pricing is very reasonable. Of all the things you can hedge, email for your own domain is probably the easiest to recover from if the operation goes under. Fastmail is great too, they’ve got great support, and if that works for you, go for it. IMO ProtonMail is right out because they’re completely proprietary for non-paying accounts and the story isn’t much better for paid ones. The big players are all still there, too, and are happy to take your money for managing your domains, but IMO they’re totally overkill for prosumer email, unless you really, really, really want Exchange ActiveSync and/or MS Outlook integration, or the use of Google’s suite of apps without ads.
As I mentioned above, I’ve been having a similar problem to the one Sheri posted originally. While I receive some of my mother’s iCloud emails, it seems like sent emails constituting either the 3rd or 4th message in the thread are not being delivered to my email hosting provider.
Using Screen Sharing, I fetched 3 of these undelivered emails from my mother’s SENT folder and retrieved the Message-ID for each one. My email host confirms that none of them appeared in the incoming message logs.
So I contacted Apple support and even got a supposed senior advisor. Supposedly, their “process” does not allow them to look up a couple Message IDs in their own logs to investigate what may have happened. Instead, they’re insisting I schedule a time with my very tech-unsavvy mother so I can be on the phone with her while we contact Apple support so they can look at her settings and then have her and I run a series of tests.
IMHO, don’t waste your time w/the phone call. It was definitely a problem on the Apple/iCloud side & as of yesterday (Monday) morning, it appears to be fixed. I also had to escalate to a senior advisor & after explaining what I’d already done, he agreed the problem was on Apple’s end, not on my end.
I was extremely disappointed w/Apple support on 2 fronts. First, the original advisor had extremely limited knowledge as to the Mac settings & Apple/iCloud in general. Secondly, having no one available over the weekend to work on the problem was unacceptable. Had this problem started on a Friday evening, iCloud mail would have been unusable for almost 3 days. Seems the lights are out & no one’s home.
Well as of 7:15 am MDT this morning, the problem I’m having is definitely NOT fixed. And the senior advisor wouldn’t even approach the possibility that the problem was on their side without running us through some battery of tests, blah, blah, blah.
This is why I use Strongbox instead of iCloud Keychain, and Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Time Machine, and my own – competent – email provider. Apple just cannot be trusted (technically) to get things right and keep them running on many of the consumer-facing mission critical features and services.
For crying out loud, you should see some of the ridiculous things they’ve accused Howard Oakley (https://eclecticlight.co) of in years past. He brings a level of Apple technical expertise that just about anyone would envy…
Very sorry to hear. iCloud mail has been working for me - and a neighbor - since Monday morning. I did my own testing - sent emails to myself w/iCloud mail - & showed the advisor while we screen shared. He saw they registered as Sent but were never delivered. He also saw, while screen sharing, that I received emails from non-iCloud accounts. That was enough for him to accept that it was an iCloud problem, not a Settings issue. While we were talking, he could see that others were reporting the same issue; appears I was the “lucky” 1st person to report the problem.
All I can say is that Apple support is nowhere near the level it was when I switched from PCs to Mac about 20 yrs ago; it was stellar at that time.
I would too. But the advisor didn’t find any record of the issue in the system when the call began. While we were still speaking, he saw other instances of the same issue appear in the system. I may not have been the “official” first, but that’s what the advisor told me. Not important whether I was the 1st, at least the problem was acknowledged & fixed.
I have an alumni email account on Outlook and it’s so damn cumbersome to use the authentication and interface that I set it up to forward incoming to another email and otherwise don’t use it.
I have been using the email that comes with my siteground web site, and I have had problems with their spam filtering being too aggressive, and whitelisting being very cumbersome to apply, so I’m always having to fish email out of the spam filter. Have any of you seen similar problems with other mail services?
Does Exchange do web hosting and if so, how do they provide it? All I see online is email hosting, and I need web hosting as well. Moreover, my experience with alumni email service provide by Microsoft Outlook was horrible, and I want to continue with Apple Mail.
No, it’s just email. When we signed up for Siteground we didn’t use their web hosting at all (we were still hosting our own server). We only signed up for their email service. In hindsight it was a poor decision.
We use Exchange for the company due to the multiple users. Personally I’m more than happy using Apple Mail as my main email service. I can’t say I’ve ever had major issues. I find the aliases on my account very handy and I use HideMyEmail for virtually every online sign up.
As a free-lance writer I need my personal domain to have a web presence for my books and other writing. I also use an email address in the domain as my primary email for business and personal email. It is coming to a point where I need to look around again. What I miss is the lack of good WYSIWYG web software for the Mac.
The fact that nobody has mentioned gmail filters makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong.
I use gmail as my primary account with no spam problem at all. Google’s spam filter has gotten a lot better, and I write filters to catch anything else.
My method does require some attention at first writing content/keyword filters based on the particular kinds of garbage I get, but eventually I got to the point I only need to write a couple per year.
Take a look at Elements. It’s very early beta days but looks very promising.
It was remiss of me not to mention this is a complete rewrite and very different to the original Rapidweaver (even though produced by the same company). IMO Elements will be significantly better and working in genuine WYSIWYG is great.
