Mail Server

My emails are currently split between three services. First of all I have a joint email address with my wife that we set up years ago on Gmail, and we mainly use for signing up to stuff for our household / shared services.

For personal email I started subscribing to HEY a few years ago, but have decided to move away from the service before my next renewal date for reasons I will one day write about.

Since as a family we get iCloud+ as part of our Apple One subscription I have setup a custom domain on iCloud mail, and am using that as my mail server. iCloud mail isn’t the most performant, but to be honest it does the job.

All HEY emails get automatically forwarded to my iCloud mailbox. I also have an old legacy Gmail account that was forwarding to HEY, but that now forwards straight to iCloud. My aim is to completely phase out both accounts by early 2025.

Mail Client

I use the default Apple Mail app for my personal email, and the Gmail app (on iOS / iPadOS) or web interface for our shared inbox. I really don’t want to have all my emails from different sources coming into one app (especially since our shared inbox gets a lot of newsletters and promotions for things only my wife is interested in).

The default Apple Mail client is fine for me - as of December 2024 I’m not particularly impressed by the Apple Intelligence features that have rolled out, but I’ll stick with it since it is clearly a cornerstone of Apple’s product direction moving forward (and I have faith that it will get better). I also like the fact that it is a general-purpose email client that will work with any IMAP server - unlike the HEY email app experience (once again, that deserves a dedicated post).

Browser

I am trying to use Orion wherever possible, however it is still in beta and I find it occasionally craps-out on some of the SPAs I use (especially on iPad), so I use Safari as a fallback in these instances.