So I made the switch from G Suite Legacy to iCloud+ (99 cents seemed like a bargain to try out) and it has a few kinks to work out.
Their documentation put double-quotes around the SPF records, and when I added them they didn't work -- had to remove the quotes completely.
And yeah, 3 email address limit and a weak icloud.com interface (compared to gmail) is also annoying.
But honestly I'll probably use it for a while, their IMAP support is good so I could always transfer emails out and point the domain records somewhere else. 99 cents a month is a bargain, the only other provider in that price range is Zoho Mail (which I also like and probably would have used if my contacts/calendar wasn't already on iCloud).
> @privaterelay.appleid.com
The @privaterelay.appleid.com is for email addresses that were created by using "Sign in with Apple", you don't have to pay for iCloud+ for that. If you create disposable emails with iCloud+ they come in the form: Coconut-Apple.0b@icloud.com (the words, numbers, and separators are random)
I'm using iCloud a as well right now as a stopgap until I find something more adequate.
Their IMAP is very slow (in true iCloud spirit). People will find it difficult to migrate larger mailboxes. I don't get why they can't just fetch my mail directly from Google.
3 email addresses without at least a catch-all option is not enough.
Their spam filter is rubbish. Even emails sent between members of the same family sharing group go to spam in spite of never leaving Apple's own infrastructure.
Many of my messages show up with an incorrect date, because they were moved between other email providers at some point, adding a more recent "Received" header. I don't blame Apple for this but it's definitely inconvenient having to preprocess the mbox file before uploading.
Apple Mail is highly unreliable and buggy. It deleted all my emails before. There doesn't appear to be any way to cancel a copy/move operation, which is particularly annoying when migrating a lot of email. But fine, there are other email clients (none that I like though).
Unfortunately, the rest of iCloud is really second rate as well. iCloud Drive has no versioning or ransomware protection whatsoever. You can't upload or download a folder from iCloud drive via the web interface. Sharing is crippled, insecure or impossible unless everyone involved uses Apple devices for absolutely everything.
So this is just not an adequate solution for any sort of professional use.
I'm trying Microsoft 365 right now. My experience started with an outage of the main admin site lasting for hours. But it can do a lot of things and it's fast. The downside is that you have to use their unbelievably sprawling, inconsistent, redundant set of admin interfaces that only make sense if you have been a Windows sysadmin since the (previous) .com bubble.
Their documentation put double-quotes around the SPF records, and when I added them they didn't work -- had to remove the quotes completely.
And yeah, 3 email address limit and a weak icloud.com interface (compared to gmail) is also annoying.
But honestly I'll probably use it for a while, their IMAP support is good so I could always transfer emails out and point the domain records somewhere else. 99 cents a month is a bargain, the only other provider in that price range is Zoho Mail (which I also like and probably would have used if my contacts/calendar wasn't already on iCloud).
> @privaterelay.appleid.com
The @privaterelay.appleid.com is for email addresses that were created by using "Sign in with Apple", you don't have to pay for iCloud+ for that. If you create disposable emails with iCloud+ they come in the form: Coconut-Apple.0b@icloud.com (the words, numbers, and separators are random)