Hello All: I am seeking recommendations of companies besides, GoDaddy or gmail when you have a domain with no website needs. Doesn’t Apple have capability of using one’s domain name on their icloud?
Thank you.
There’s good advice from Josh here:
I suspect the service will be out of beta by now.
I have been very happy with pobox.com – they’ve been around forever and have a lot of nice features at reasonable prices. I use them to manage email for several domains that have no other presence on the 'net.
I use Fastmail. It’s five dollars per month, but I’m more than willing to pay for a service that doesn’t use my emails to market to me. It’s IMAP service is way better than Google’s.
The nice thing is that my domain can be fully used by others with their email aliases. Now, if you use an email alias (for example, bob@white.mail is a forward for bobwhite34734@gmail.com), you can both send and receive emails from your alias email address because Fastmail will do header rewrites.
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Thank you so much.
Thank you so much! Now I have a path.
There’s always Microsoft. They will host your email and have absolutely no interest (at this time) in hosting a web site for you.
Google. Gmail on your domain.
I’ll just add a general note here for those wanting to do what Tori asked about (or struggling with email delivery problems). We are in a situation with email where the tools (algorithms) designed to filter out spam on receiving mail servers can easily filter legitimate messages. To fix that, more tools were added so that emails can be “authenticated” as they are processed. So now “email deliverability” is a whole area of complexity that can cause trouble for us end-users.
In my case, I do have a website and my email passes through that hosting company (InMotion). Unfortunately hosting accounts on a “shared” server typically also share an outgoing (smtp) mail server. If other users send spam then that IP address gets blocked and my emails are rejected (or delayed). Large players, like google, can keep their outgoing mail under control, so IPs from google are considered “safe” by receiving servers. In the case of InMotion, they will rotate smtp servers if they know that an IP address has been blocked, but this is not foolproof (and requires me to re-send the email if/when I receive a bounce message).
So I decided to try using google in the same way that Josh’s article describes for iCloud; Gmail allows you to use another domain address for email through a Gmail account. It was some trouble to set up, but seemed to work. Except my test messages were not being delivered. I believe this was caused by problems in the “deliverability” aspect of the message–that is, various domains in the header did not match, which is a test for spam. In theory I should have been able to fix this in the SPF record of my domain’s DNS zone records, but could not. Hopefully the records provided by iCloud and other services have the correct info to make this work!
In the end I upgraded my hosting account to a virtual private server, which has its own smtp address (and costs a whole lot more) This experiment was hours and hours of work but a learned a lot! In general, receiving emails is easy, but making sure yours get delivered is hard. Conversely, though, you may not receive an email if the incoming mail server of your account is blocking an address from a sending server. If you don’t receive an email, but the person says they sent it, this might be why.
I’m going back to the effing telephone…
They’re working on JMAP which they hope one day will replace all the proprietary IMAP based protocols and maybe even SMTP, POP, and IMAP completely.
However, JMAP isn’t quite ready. It’s been accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the final draft of the email portion has been published. But, the calendar implementation and contact implementation is still being worked on.
It’ll take years for clients to implement JMAP and for the major mail services to offer JMAP support. Some might never offer it. (Cough! Gmail! Cough!).
One of the things that strike me about JMAP’s website is the lack of members of the JMAP working group being listed. Except for Fastmail, I don’t know who’s backing it.
It’s be nice if big email clients like Apple were listed. Even better if Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and the cable companies were also members of the JMAP working group. Then, we know that all email clients would soon support it.