Hello All: I rarely post, so if I am missing something, let me know. I have a domain name and I would like to transfer the hosting of the email address only to my apple email account. I understand what is needed based on the instructions I see online. Any suggestions or tips are greatly appreciated. QUESTION - I know that this may have a logical answer, nevertheless, will I then have 2 email accounts from Apple - the current one and my domain email address or will everything be transferred to the domain email address?
I’ve done this. It was quite smooth. You’ll continue to have your iCloud.com (or mac.com or whatever your current iCloud address is) email as a separate entity from your domain address email.
I don’t think you can “transfer” your domain name email account to icloud. There needs to be an email server associated with that email account. I assume Network Solutions provides that service.
Provided you keep the account with the domain name active (i.e. paid for each year or so) you can access your domain email from Apple Mail. A relevant Apple Support page is here:
This will allow you to send and receive emails with that account as well as deleting emails. If you use a Mac you can even move/copy them to an On-my-Mac local mailbox for archiving purposes (a good idea if you ever cancel the domain account).
As you have indicated above, you will likely need some technical details of the email account in order to set it up manually. The Apple Support page has some tips.
I tried it with my own domain that I already owned, but I found it too restricting for my domain at the time. Since then I don’t need as many email accounts for that domain and could probably use iCloud for this, but I already pay Fastmail for email and could use that instead for my domain, so that’s what I am using now.
The iCloud+ feature is good news. Just to clarify, it looks like you can use iCloud+ to create a new domain name to use with emails. This, of course, is only possible if that domain name does not already exist.
If you already have a domain name via another provider (eg Network Solutions) then you can access the emails with Apple Mail/iCloud+ but you will need to continue to pay that provider for the domain name.
To “transfer” a domain name email to iCloud you might be able to cancel the domain name with the provider and, once the cancellation is actioned, register it with iCloud. But there is a risk that it won’t be available or, worse still, another party grabs it, which would compromise your security with current email recipients. Note that I don’t know the rules for cancelling domain names and re-using them.
Yes, this appears to be how it works (according to the Apple docs). You set up the custom domain in iCloud+, then Apple provides instructions for changing the DNS records to point to iCloud mail.
I user Hover for my domain, but I’m sure it’s the same at Network Solutions. There should be an online account that you log in to and manage the DNS settings from there.
Actually you might have mac.com, me.com, and icloud.com addresses because the latter two are aliases of the first. However, if your first Apple Account email address was me.com then you may just have an icloud.com alias, or if the icloud address was your first, then you probably won’t have an alias. I have all three since I started with Dot Mac.