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This is the way
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I was on Gmail with a custom domain for a good 7 years or so and in this last year I switched to iCloud mail and have been happy with it. I trust apple more than I do google when it comes to email privacy. And I think what really pulled me over to having apple host my mail is the private relay feature which is super cool.
Do you use it in windows or just apple devices? If so, does it give you any pain using it outside the apple ecosystem?
the better question is - how do you transfer out of Google Mail to anything else after 15 years of usage of this mail? at this point even if Im willing to, I just can’t, too many places to be transferred.
I managed to do so very easy. I set up my google mail in my iPad (in apples own mail app). I then also set up my iCloud mail. I waited for my whole account to download all of my gmail emails (like 20 years of mails). Then I just selected all and moved them into iCloud inbox. The mails were in my iCloud inbox (on iPad) nearly instantly, I was really amazed. Of course it took its time until it was all synced to my iCloud Storage and then downloaded to my phone, but it worked pretty easy actually. And it even got all the dates from my old mails right. Couldn’t have worked any better!
Edit: oh and I did this for 3 gmail accounts now. When I was done, I set up email forwarding to apples „hide my mail“ feature in all of them and selected delete gmail mail version after forwarding. This way I still get mails sent to my old mail accounts, without google knowing my new iCloud mail. Definitely recommend this.
oh, that edit tip is quite a good one, to set up the forward for the @gmail account to @icloud. that way I wouldn’t have to visit every place the mail was used to change it. however, it would be still good to do the full transition some day :D
Set your reply to email address to your iCloud email and add a like in your signature to get people to update their address book with your new email.
You will still need to log into each web service and change your email over though. At that point, might as well use “hide my email” for all of those web services (or to anyone really).
Maybe setup a rule so that all emails arrive to you via the forward from gmail will go into a different folder for you to review. At least for a bit. Maybe after a month or 2. You can fully transition over
BTW… If your Apple ID is linked to something other than an iCloud Mail keep in mind that you won’t be able to switch to an iCloud mail address as primary address for your Apple ID. I did all this transition last week and spoke to apple for like an hour. They told me there is no way to switch. So now my gmail is like the user name for my Apple ID, every mail that is sent to gmail now gets forwarded to an hide my mail email. The problem was, that „hide my mail“ mails get normally forwarded to your primary Apple ID Mail address, in my case the gmail address. So what I did now was creating an iCloud mail over my iPhone‘s iCloud settings and then went to iCloud.com on my browser, where you then are able to switch the „hide my mails“ recipient address to the just created iCloud mail. Pretty complicated solution, but the only way to at least kind of get rid of my gmail address…
strange this should work fairly easy: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8562259
Hmm… If i am Reading this right, my problem could have been, that my iCloud mail wasn’t created more than 30days ago. I will definitely try that.
I just wonder why apple support didn’t came up with that…
I will update once I tried (iCloud email is currently about 6/7 days old, so I will have to wait a while)
Oh and Thanks for that suggestion!
I literally switched my Apple ID from my gmail email address to my Apple @me.com email address today
@lackthought how did the switch go? Any friction or speed bumps?
it was smooth for me, I went to this address:
https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage
- Signed in with my existing gmail Apple ID
- clicked the Apple ID link to change my address
- entered my @me.com address
- grabbed the verification code from my email
and that was pretty much it, now I can sign in with my @me address for Apple ID
I didn’t even need to log out on any of my devices, they display the @me address in the settings as my Apple ID instead of the gmail address
I switched from Gmail to iCloud and from iCloud to Fastmail. Couldn’t be happier. Give it a try.
iCloud Mail doesn’t have any advanced features, but it works great, it has no ads, it’s form a company with a good reputation, and it’s very cheap.
If the feature set has what you need, there really isn’t anything better (unless you pay a lot more).
@abhibeckert what advanced features would you want?
iCloud Mail 🏆
I haven’t used gmail in years, but I switched my domain email from O365 to iCloud about a year ago to save a few dollars a month (already have iCloud+ 200gb). Pretty much just works how I expect email to, haven’t had any issues. I used Apple Mail already on my devices so same UI and everything for me.
I use iCloud mail because everything I own is Apple. You just can’t beat how it syncs between my phone, Watch, iPad & MacBook. FWIW, the native mail app is the only one that can compose a new email from scratch on an Apple Watch. I’m all in with Apple services.
worst thing about icloud mail is the terrible junk filtering which you literally cannot disable and always has false positives. best you can do is set up a rule to move junk to inbox.
best thing is hide my email
I use both, though I don’t really use icloud email. I mostly use gmail because of the ease of access to it’s library of apps. And for me it’s much easier to upload/download files to google drive then it is to the icloud.
How good is the search feature in iCloud mail? How does it compare to gmail? Can you quickly and accurately find stuff?
I wrote a whole thing on this, but tldr; I switched from Gmail to iCloud about a year ago. Gmail is better at filters, search, web UI, and spam filtering. iCloud is better at native UI, offline support, and ecosystem integration.
Overall I’m happy with it but only because I’m willing to pay the costs for the benefits, which I think is pretty rare.
I’ve almost finished transition to iCloud. No issues at all. I value my privacy more and more and with news google is going to train their LLMs on your content it was a no brainer for me.
Do you have a source for that last bit? Not doubting, just genuinely want to learn about this if true.
