Yes, that is why I moved to https://www.dynu.com/ You can turn of server spam filtering and use SpamSieve.
“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.”
Your domain can use different servers/hosts for web and email, so there’s no need to change the web hosting if you’re satisfied with it. You just need to add MX (mail delivery) records to a different mail service to your domain records.
You usually do this at your domain registrar’s site, though they can also have that point to a different DNS server, which sometimes happens with all-in-one web hosting sites (especially if they sold you the domain), so you may need to have the web host change the records (or better, find out how to get full control back to the real domain registrar). So you’ll need to sort that out, but it’s a good idea to know what’s where on general principles anyway.
Fastmail’s outline of what to do to shift mail delivery is pretty good, and other others will have the some sort of procedure:
Fastmail’s other domain setup help pages could also be useful:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/sections/1500000062601-Domain-setup
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My experience with Apple’s email began well, when it started, and deteriorated. So a long time ago I made iCloud mail my back up, set up my own domains and made email addresses for the domains. Which is actually very easy and the cost of hosting your domain can be very reasonable. I use http and ftp as well but even if you just use it for mail, it should be inexpensive. Now I disable iCloud mail for a month and then go in for a sweep of all the mail which has accrued, 99% of which is trashed and then I turn iCloud mail off again. If there is a glitch with my host’s server, which sometimes happens, I break out iCloud mail for a few hours and then put it away again. It is a little untidy but it seems to work and - so far - I have not had the non appearing iCloud email problem.
Thanks for the info on moving my mail service. It now looks like Siteground was blocking mail from GoogleGroups. I have now been able to whitelist it, and have already received one mail from a previously blocked list. However, this revealed another problem: I regularly check their spam filter to fish out the good mail, and I never saw anything from GoogleGroups in their spam. So they appear to have put the blocked Google Groups upstream of the spam filter.
As it happens, I discovered a similar problem with Gmail several weeks ago. A client had sent me a contract through Docusign to my gmail address and I never received it. He tried again, and this time I checked the the Gmail’s Trash folder in Apple Mail. There was the contract. The editor looked into the problem and said fraudsters were using Docusign in scams, so contracts from Docusign were being blocked be being trashed without going through a spam filter where the recipient could check if legitimate mail was being put in spam. That sort of blockage because of suspected fraud could be another source of missing email.
We used to host our own domain and mail exchange — when you are tech savvy you do that kind of thing for, I don’t know, 20 years or so. In the end I realized that there is more to life than fighting to keep up with the latest and greatest anti-spam tech. There’s also the question of how will your non-tech savvy partner be able to maintain the setup if/when you are hit by that obnoxious bus…
We decided to switch to a professional mail provider — but wanted a secure solution. We ended up with posteo.de. They are very privacy minded, absolutely minimize the amount of data they hold about their customers, support encryption of your mailbox at rest, and just started offering SMIME certificates for 1 € per month. Perhaps worth a look at.
This is sad to hear…both the email situation and the support situation. I had hoped to move back to iCloud mail but it seems Apple’s “mediocrity creep” has reached it as well. (I had been trying out Proton but I just don’t like Web apps, and their Bridge product which worked with macOS Mail was getting updated every day and requiring certificate reinstallation each time…ugh.)
Thank you so much for the information. My plans to switch to iCloud are scuttled but it’s better to know. That they had to be told about this problem by customers instead of figuring out themselves is in itself very telling imo.
That’s very strange, because the certificate issue does not happen on any of my Macs (three of them.) I had to do it once last year on one system. And honestly I never notice it updating, so while it’s possible that it updates every day, I don’t notice it at all if it does.
Looking at the settings, I wonder if you turned on the “beta access” setting?
I just looked at my logs - I am running version 3.8.1, updated from 3.7.1 in late January (I was traveling all January so it may have been available earlier than that), updated from 3.6.1 on January 14, updated from 3.5.4 in November 2023. So I am definitely not seeing daily updates.
Hmm, thanks for that info; maybe I’ll give Bridge another shot. I didn’t have beta access turned on but I definitely got prompted, and did update, multiple times in one week. Maybe because I was running an older version of macOS?