One of the best hosted mail costs just $0.99/month

I've obtained some amounts of email addresses over the years. Perhaps somewhat ToS breaking, I've had probably more than a dozen Gmail accounts I had accumulated over the years for various purposes. I've then started using Cloudflare's Email routing for receiving emails sent to my domains - sometimes someone might just send a random inquiry about some random stuff - the kind of stuff you really do not want to miss. To Cloudflare's credit - their solution works absolutely fine... until you try to reply to an email.

Now, I know, I know. No-where in Cloudflare's service do they ever advertise that feature. But it's just a pain when someone sends you an email and you have to prove that you aren't just someone doing a MITM on their communications by replying from another email address. I grew really tired of that and started searching for other solutions.

Self hosting my email

For a while, I did self-host my email. I just got iredmail and a bunch of whatnot on a BuyVM's VPS (shout out to them BTW, best VPS provider by a far stretch). It served me well enough... until I missed an email for some random reason and a domain was suspended. Being a terrible admin myself, I'm usually not the first person to notice when something goes wrong (I'm year 11 at that time - don't expect much). But given that reliability is such a huge metric for a somewhat decent email service, I decided to start searching for alternatives

Apple's Custom Email Domains

I'm a pretty big Apple user. Not exactly an Apple fan - although I'm locked into the ecosystem so much that the only thing I don't have is an Apple Watch. Usually Apple's tech isn't exactly the most associated with being cost-effective - especially if you're not in the states and your government decides to slap a massive tax on the price. But once when scrolling through iCloud settings, I realized that you can actually use your own domains with iCloud.

It works wonderfully. Not only do I not sleep worrying that iredmail got terminated for some random reason, it's surprisingly easy to setup. If your domain uses Cloudflare for nameservers, then it's just a few button clicks and you're in. Even if not, it's the same as setting up email with any other service, minus the hassle of running your own servers. Best of all, I've not had a single instance of my email ending up in the spam folder - while I never send out any unsolicited emails, sometimes services likes putting (especially outlook) all emails from a public email service into a blacklist just because some random idiot decides to spam people using that. iCloud's servers are surprisingly clean. There's also catch-all if you're into privacy, but at that point you can just use iCloud's hide-my-email package that also just comes with iCloud for unlimited amounts of email aliases. Sweet!

The best thing about it is that it's use friendly. Also works for the random family member where you can just assign them emails. Don't know why you'd want to do that, but hey, it's an option.

Now you might be asking about the price, because if you google "Apple email host", nothing really comes up. Well, it's a feature included in all paid iCloud plans, which means that if you're already paying for 50GB of storage to fit your notability documents, well congratulations, you've just found a free and very reliable email host. Otherwise, plans starts at $0.99 and even lower in some countries.

Also, for Chinese users, do note that the Chinese iCloud plans do not offer this service due to local regulations.