Thanks for your reply, John. I have never been able to reply/send in Apple Mail, so I don’t use it. All I have it the comcast.net email. So I was hoping I could reply to the Hide My Email email address.
If you can receive but not send in your Apple Mail (I assume you mean in the apple Mail.app) then the outgoing SMTP server isn’t set up right. (Mail > Settings > Accounts > Server Settings ). Easiest fix is to delete the email account and then re-create it as a new account. Your mail is actually stored on the server (e.g., iCloud), so you won’t lose any mail by deleting the account. Mail.app will simply re-populate from the server when you re-create the account. If you have a “standard” mail service (iCloud, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Mail.app will set all the right server settings when you create the account.
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David C’s advice is spot on. pay for email. It’s worth it.
You said yourself that this is the last time you want to do this. Your forever home, if you will. Getting a domain name that you control and paying for a quality email provider is your forever home.
Use a reputable provider. I use Fastmail, no affiliation, just a happy customer for many years. I think that there are others. You can get recommendations here. That’s mine.
I’ve had (or have) email accounts with virtually all of the services, Gmail AOL EarthLink Yahoo Microsoft Apple etc etc. They all have one thing in common; email isn’t their core business. As a business, they don’t live and die by the quality of their email service. Fastmail does. (I sure many of the other high-quality paid providers do as well.) ISP-provided email service is usually the absolute worst, in my experience.
Once you get an account at Fastmail, you’ll get a username@fastmail.com. You can use that if you want, although it might be long and ugly this late into the game. You can keep that. You’ll probably log into your account with that. Then you can ignore that.
The next thing you do is to get your own domain name (any domain name, really, folks here can help you navigate web sites that help you search for shorter ones) and add an account name of your choosing @yournewdomain.com to your Fastmail account so that every email sent to that email address goes through Fastmail. It’s not that hard, and Fastmail will walk you through it. If I did it, you can do it. You can ignore your original fastmail.com email address, or use both. Because it’s a paid provider, Fastmail provides tech support. Try that with Google.
Also, get a good domain provider. I use hover.com (there are a few others that have good reputations.) Ask around, including here.
If, for some reason, you don’t like your email provider (or they go belly up), you can back up you existing email and point your domain to some other provider. It’s not trivial, but it’s also not hard.
Ask the good folks here if you need help. Most of them are far more experienced than me.
You can certainly try Apple’s email service. I use it on occasion. But it’s not the best, not by a long shot.
Don’t let the fact that this all seems intimidating keep you from doing it. It’s important. You will get help. We’ve all gotten help from time to time.
Good luck on your journey.
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