Icloud

I’ve been using my custom domain with iCloud email for a couple weeks. Truth be told I hardly notice any difference from when I used Gmail. That’s largely due to using Apple Mail app as my primary interface. I haven’t had any reliability issues and the only real difference I’ve noticed is the email size limit is 20MB as opposed to Gmail’s 25MB. The primary benefit I’ve seen is that calendar invites end up on my iCloud calendar, which is where I prefer them. ...

I’m in the process of migrating my email from Google Workspace to iCloud+. I’ve been using Google Workspace (aka gsuite, aka whatever name Google switches to next week) for my email for a long time. For ages it was free and made perfect sense as a service. Those free accounts have gone away, and the service’s focus is clearly aimed at the enterprise and not individuals like me. The price per user is also about to increase on me, so this felt like a good time to try something else. I’m only really interested in hosting email for a few custom domains and have no needs for any features beyond that. Our family already uses iCloud for everything so I figured why not give it a try. ...

A couple weeks ago my iPhone developed a permanent vertical line down the right side of the screen. I have a Squaretrade extended warranty on the phone so I filed a claim. Squaretrade responded less than 12 hours later to request pictures. It is difficult to capture with a camera, but I did the best I could. I emailed Squaretrade these pictures at 9pm. The next morning I already had a response in my inbox saying my claim was approved and they would be overnighting a (refurbished) replacement phone. It was an incredibly easy process and Squaretrade was a pleasure to deal with. I also did not have to pay any form of deductible since it wasn’t considered accidental damage (i.e. cracked screen, phone in toilet). ...

Yesterday I determined a compromise. I’m going to keep using iCloud for contacts and calendars. Google sync makes a mess of contacts, iCloud “just works.” I’ll keep using Gmail for my main email. I’ll access it through Apple Mail on the desktop and the iPhone’s built in mail app. Here’s how I set it up to avoid duplicate messages and other craziness. Log into Gmail’s settings and navigate to the labels tab. Here you can control which labels show up in IMAP. What I did was hide all mail, starred, and important from IMAP. ...

I’ve used Gmail or several years and have really enjoyed the experience. It’s not without its quirks however. Anyone who has ever used Gmail with an IMAP client can attest to how wonky things can get. The way Gmail’s All Mail folder functions causes lots of duplicate messages to show up. If a message has a label it will appear in both a folder for that label as well as in the All Mail folder. If you search for a message in the client multiple copies will pop up. The Gmail experience on the iPhone is also annoying. You can setup up Gmail through IMAP just like a desktop client, with all of the duplicate messages, but you can’t get push. That means I have to set my phone to poll the network at a certain interval. This is bad for battery life at high settings and means that messages don’t show up right away. The other option is to set up Gmail though Google sync as an exchange server. You can get push with this option but deleting a message will always archive it. I don’t want to archive all the junk newsletter messages I get. To delete a message with this setup I have to select it and then manually move it to Gmail’s trash folder. ...