Hello everyone. I would like to solicit advice from this trusted community. I searched TidBits talk but didn’t find exactly what my wife and I need. There is an existing “How to Set Up Custom Email Domains with iCloud Mail” article and discussion from 2021, but we don’t need custom domains. We have been with Comcast cable and internet for well over 20 years, and with the rising Xfinity ISP costs and the move to fiber, we are wanting to leave Xfinity and move to a fiber ISP. As may be obvious, we also have over 20 years of comcast.net as our addresses that would have to be updated for lots on contacts and businesses. We are fully in the Apple ecosystem (Macs, iPhones and iPads) for over 30 years. We both have icloud.com and me.com addresses with Apple, but we have rarely used them. Since we don’t trust Google, MS, or Yahoo for privacy concerns, Apple seems to be a logical choice to be our main email service. We do have iCloud+ in place. We don’t have any quibbles with Apple Mail apps and use SpamSieve for excellent spam filtering.
My question is how well does the icloud email system work? Is there still an issue with Apple silent filtering of email? As noted above, with the great job SpamSieve does with filtering, we really don’t need Apple’s help with this. If/when we move away from Xfinity, we know we have a lot of work to do to contact and change our primary email addresses for a multitude of contacts from comcast.net to Apple or whatever the next best choice would be. Any advice and experiences in this type of change would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
The other option is to pay for a separate e-mail service. This will let you switch away from Apple as well, should you want to in the future.
And if you create your own domain name, it will let you migrate to different servers in the future without breaking everybody else, since your address will remain the same.
I haven’t done this, but others here have and there have been many discussions on the subject, so you should be able to learn enough to decide if it’s something you want to do.
My understanding is that you can keep your Comcast email even if you disconnect your paid Comcast service. The main caveat is that you need to login to your Comcast account at least once every nine months to keep it active. I think that if you are using Apple Mail app to connect to Comcast email, that counts as logging in.
I made a move from ISP email to iCloud email a few years ago. Some things I suggest based on my experience:
Plan on at least a month or two of overlap before cancelling your ISP account to ensure the transition was set up correctly.
As soon as your iCloud address is active, set up automatic forwarding to it from your ISP account(s).
Maintain a list of the changes you need to make and have made with affected companies and people.
Ensure you have a backup or copies of important and treasured emails.
Check all of your 2-factor authentication setups to make sure none are using your (soon to be) cancelled email address.
I now prefer having my email hosted by a non-ISP company because I no longer am held captive by the time and effort required to implement changes to my email address.
One thing I used to catch any senders I missed was to forward my old email address to my new one. Then I created a rule that put all emails sent to the old address into a different folder. That made it easy to fix the ones I missed.
Excellent! I have done similar, but the rule changes the background color of the email in the main window, making it visisble and annoying enough that I deal with it soon.
I have been using Apple email since golly, at least back to the me dot com era and been quite satisfied with it until recently when emails indicated being sent but were never rec’d by recipients, and I only noticed after about 3 weeks. No bounce or other error messages. Chatted with about six Apple agents and they were unable to understand or help me with the issue. The outgoing server I selected would not remain selected, it kept reverting to None.
But I digress…
I’m not accessing my mail on iCloud so nothing to add there.
Silent filtering afaik still occurs and has occasionally been an annoyance. Senders reach me through other means and I have to apologize that Apple may have misidentified their message and prevented it reaching my inbox. Yet still several spam emails a day sneak through and don’t respond to the disposal rules I set up.
You might also consider, if you haven’t already done so, to establish one Mac as your email archive machine, and save your email ‘On My Mac’ and then be sure to have good thorough backups. Then it won’t matter if your ISP goes bust, changes, etc.
Transition over many months unless you are super organized. Some businesses or others who use the old address might only contact you 1-2 times a year and might lose the connection if turn off the old address too quickly.
You can set up a rule in Apple Mail App to send a reply to email sent to the discontinued address so senders know about the change.
There might also be some useful tips in Take Control of Apple Mail by Joe Kissell.
I don’t know how universal it is, but Outlook (on Windows, when using a corporate Exchange server) lets you configure it for when you’re out of the office. It auto-replies a message to everybody (no more than one per day per sender) and still delivers the message to your inbox.
If you set this up on the old server (after informing everybody about the new address), it should help all human senders with the transition.
I use Titan mail via name.com and it’s great. I doesn’t cost much, less than $20 a year. I have it setup to read in Apple’s mail app so it’s really easy to access on my Mac, iPads and iPhone.
Having your own email server has some advantages, but it can be complex to set up. One important thing to watch out for is that some servers are designed mainly for personal accounts, not for businesses, and their spam filtering may designed to minimize spam received for personal email rather than to encourage new contacts, which businesses want.
If you are in Verizon territory, their FiOS fiber service is great but their email is on AOL which is awful. I set my old Verizon account to forward all incoming to another account.
I think @josehill’s advice above is really good. Your original post seemed to assume that cancelling your Xfinity service would render your comcast.net address unusable, which apparently is not necessarily true. That seems the simplest solution to your problem, and if you can verify that, well, as my UK friends say, Bob’s your uncle.
@Shamino also mentioned creating your own domain as a solution. I can speak a little to that. I’ve had a personal domain since 1998. It is hosted by a major provider; I do not run my own email server. For the first 15 years or so, it worked flawlessly. In the last 5-10 years though, I’ve had a lot more bounces and rejects on sent messages, and even spent some time on a blacklist. The latter was due to my using a shared server at my hosting provider, and apparently having a naughty neighbor. The former (bounces, etc.) has required me to learn a lot more about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, and setting my domain up with the appropriate records.
All this time, I’ve had a mac.com address as well, which I use fairly regularly, and have had zero issues with. Some here have reported occasional silent filtering of inbound mail, but I haven’t seen it personally. So, a personal domain will indeed give you maximum flexibility, but it does (in my experience) require more hands-on attention than just using your mac.com address and hoping Apple outlasts you.
@mjvega2
I could have written your question! I, too, have a comcast.net email address. My husband passed away 3 years ago. I still have his yahoo.com email active in case something important goes there. Waste Management, our trash company, wouldn’t allow me to take control of our account and change his email to mine. Last week, I tried to create an account with my .net email address and I was denied because Waste Management’s website doesn’t allow .net email!!!
I can receive Apple Mail, but have never been able to SEND any email. I have been thinking of creating a “hide my email” address that will still go to my Comcast email. But I haven’t researched it if I can create my own hide my email.
I, too, think that the best and knowledgeable people are here on Tidbits and always share and help. I am so thankful I found this group!
If you’re interested in a non-Apple option, users of the DuckDuckGo browser can set up an unlimited number of single-use email addresses, hosted by DuckDuckGo, that are automatically forwarded to the email address of your choice.
Sort of diverging from the e-mail-question topic, but, you may want to consider (as a substitute for fiber ISP), Verizon Home Internet, especially if you already have a Verizon account for phone service. If so, the cost is 45.00/month. It is not quite up to fiber-cable speed (yet), but it is totally adequate in my opinion, and with a bona fide 5G signal provided by Verizon, I believe this option will get better with time, performance-wise. Plus, no messing with wires coming into you residence !
You could alternatively opt for one of the other cell-signal providers. See referenced TidBits articles.
References:
I want to thank all of you for the great advice, help, feedback, etc. It is a lot to think about. I did order the Take Control of Apple Mail book (at a discount, thanks TidBITS), so will look closely at that. I had done my homework upfront so I am aware of the option of continuing to use the comcast.net account even if we D/C Xfinity. But other than making sure all of our contacts migrate to icloud.com or whatever email provider we end up choosing, it seems illogical to keep using the Comcast address. Maybe my thinking is too rigid on this but getting rid of Comcast will be refreshing.
Thanks for the great suggestion to use scripting and rules to catch any old comcast.net emails that we had not updated. I plan on doing this, and will do this for several months.
As to cable vs fiber vs 5G wireless, we are on Verizon cellular but get poor 5G reception on our iPhones at our house dead zone (much better in the rest of our city where we get 5GUW). We are spoiled by our current Xfinity internet speed and stability (very stable for us for years, but continually rising costs) but fiber is faster, cheaper although not sure of stability.
Finally, as to my original question as to icloud.com usage, I’ll think about finding a different email provider, but at our age (early 70’s) I don’t want to have to redo this process ever again, and I’m sure Apple will outlive us but not sure of other providers. From all your feedback and my research on Apple’s sometimes aggressive filtering, I’m also not sure what to make of that.