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Again with the iCloudy Weather?

By On · 6 Comments
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Back in March I wrote about losing my iCloud email for 24 hours. The same problem has cropped up several more times since then, although none of the outages has been as lengthy. What is disturbing is the increasing frequency and Apple’s continued silence on the subject. Last Friday it was out for 3 hours. Yesterday it was 90 minutes, although my time frame didn’t coincide with the time (allowing for time zone difference) Apple finally listed — well after the system was back up. Credible sources say that Apple is getting ready to add more features to iCloud, and while that’s all fine and good, let’s fix the email problems first. Over the years, I’ve moved all of my personal mail to my .mac/.me address because it was always reliable and I had it no matter who I used for an ISP. I have a Gmail account, but I use it for the non-critical/non-business/non-family things. It is, in essence, a throw-away address. Yahoo mail? Nope. I won’t have a yahoo account. Every time I’ve heard of someone having an email account compromised or hijacked it has been a yahoo account.

So, now I’m asking you, my techie friends, who is your email provider of choice, and why. I never thought the day would come when I would dump my Apple email address, but the day is coming soon if Apple can’t get a handle on this. Especially when Apple doesn’t acknowledge the problem until after it has been fixed.

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  • http://macgroup.org James R

    We have used mail.com as a supplier since last century with minimal problems. Mail.com has many specialty domains like saintly.com and consultant.com you can choose to use.

    • Phyllis Evans

      I set up an imap account with mail.com, it’s cheap enough. Had no problem adding it to my iPad Mail app. Then, I set up a forward on my iCloud account, and that’s when it got strange. It seems that (at least for the moment) iCloud will forward to my gmail account but totally ignores forwarding to mail.com.

  • Brian

    I started off by registering a domain through namecheap, setting up an email address, and forwarding that to whatever current email address I had (cable company, gmail, etc.). Then, I ended up with a small hosting account through hostgator. Now I have full control of my email and it is easy to move hosts if issues arise (which they haven’t). Plus, I have some webspace to host websites, photo galleries, etc.

  • http://yourmacexpert.com/ Steven Klein

    I’m so glad you asked. I have my own domain, and I get excellent email service from my hosting company.

    The best part about this arrangement is that if I ever become dissatisfied with the service, I can take my business elsewhere, while keeping my email address.

    Here’s a link to my hosting company: http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=10256701

    (That link includes my affiliate code, so I get a small commission if you get a hosting plan from them.)

  • Peter

    I too have always used my me/mac email as the “sure thing” email. Yes, I have noticed a lack of consistency in the delivery service, from mail not being pushed to “outages”. I too have mail.com as my other service and found that mapping it to the phone was not without it’s problems. mail.com now has an ap that works great. However, one has to access it to find new mail.

    Frankly, in my opinion, if Apple is going to continue to be in the email/IM game, then the company should put a priority on near perfect service

  • JP Clough

    I’ve been using a free basic email account from lavabit.com for the past few years, which works pretty well for me.

    According to their website they are very hot on privacy, even hinting that the free email service was set up specifically to be a more privacy-conscious equivalent to Gmail!

    On the downside I would say that the webmail interface is not exactly outstanding, although perfectly serviceable if need be – but I usually access my mail via a client such as Thunderbird or on iPhone/iPod Touch, so it’s not really a problem.

    Hope this is useful…

    By the way I’m based in England and have never been to Detroit in my life, but I came across your Mac Group app some time ago and regularly pick up some useful tips, so thanks to y’all :) Best wishes