Three weeks on iCloud Mail

I’ve been using iCloud+ Mail for the past three weeks after switching from Fastmail, and wanted to share some thoughts.

Overall, it’s been good. Emails get sent, and as far as I can tell, I’m receiving everything.

Some small annoyances:

• The web app is Not Good™ but it does the job. Fastmail remains the best in responsiveness and design
• Rules can only be added/edited in the web app, which wouldn’t be a problem if the web app was good
• If you have a lot of addresses/aliases, consolidating to fit iCloud Mail’s limit of 3 per domain is a pain
• Hide My Email doesn’t forward to a plus address with iCloud Mail, but worked fine when the same address was on Fastmail.

Spam is not a problem, but the rate at which I receive spam is about 1 email every 2 days, so it’s hard to judge. Most spam (outside of unsolicited newsletters) gets filtered accurately.

Chris Wiegman mentioned today that he’s received a lot of spam while on iCloud+ Mail. Bryce Wray mentioned that the spam filter worked too well, but he moved back to Fastmail because it worked better with a mail client he likes.

I noticed my spam rate has gone down since the switch, but I realized it was because my spam-filled Gmail/Outlook accounts aren’t set up to forward to iCloud. Fastmail has a cool feature where it can check other email accounts for you and function as your one-stop shop for email, but there’s nothing like that with iCloud Mail. I’ll just add those accounts to my mail client.

If you’re trying to cut down on subscriptions like I am, and already have Apple One, I recommend iCloud+ Mail.