I host about a half dozen on Office 365. When Apple came out, I switched my wife over to iCloud, since we were paying for apple anyways.

Big mistake. Spam filtering on Apple is absolutely horrific. The volume of crap she started to receive was amazing.

Flipped back.

I experienced the same thing. I switched a couple of domains over to iCloud and within a week moved them elsewhere. I went from pracically no spam to hundreds of blatently obvious and easy to catch spam emails hitting the inboxes every day.

I dont know what Apple uses for spam protection, but its total junk. I could roll a better spam protection myself!

As far as I can tell, they are still using Oracle’s flavor of the Sun Internet Mail Server, which was such a piece of unfettered crap when I had to run it in 1999-2004 that we had to set up proxy MTAs in front.

Hmm. Maybe there’s a learning element or a bug with custom domains? I’ve used iCloud for years and rarely see spam in my inbox.

What client do you use? I switched to iCloud and started using the Apple Mail app for its integration with Hidden Email Addresses, but the app is totally half baked with tons to weird behaviours (ex. Send an email. A week later no response, click reply on the email and now you are emailing yourself. Ok, so click Reply-all and now you need to delete yourself and move the original recipient to the To line. No one-click way to start a follow up email!)

I’ve used Apple Mail on iOS and Mac exclusively for about 5-6 years. Maybe my workflow is just adapted but the only issues I’ve had were the macOS version occasionally locking up or giving inconsistent search results usually solved by restarting the app.

I just moved to iCloud and have the opposite problem. I forward my gmail emails to it, and most of them end up in the spam folder.

To contrast, I set up a brand new email and slowly migrated my critical access to the new iCloud domain. Virtually all my other sign-up accounts are still routing to gmail, I just left that dumpster fire to burn and re-access only when needed.

My spam inbound rate has been non-existent.

In your case, gmail is the dumpster fire?

It was the most sensible way to escape nearly 5000 unread emails, and avoid that issue from recurring; iCloud stays at inbox zero.

Noted.

Lack of catch all there seems to be a blocker for many including me

Supports catch-all now

It supports it since iOS 15 if I’m not mistaken (last year release)

This is probably the best dollar I spend every month

Email isn’t done on the OS though. A server is doing it. Is there a reason Apple hides this behind an iOS version?

The user above you was mistaken. You can flip it from the web settings. I was running it on my iOS 14.6 device for a while.

It’s announced alongside new iOS versions at WWDC and Apple doesn’t break out new iCloud features separate from their new OS feature pages.

I only found out about this benefit of iCloud+ a few days ago, thankfully a few days before my prior solution was due to renew for another 2 years at a vastly more expensive rate.

Certainly easy to set up. DNS with CloudFlare and it was able to do it all with just a login confirmation from my side of things.

Yup. I was already paying for iCloud and already had my custom domain email on Google.

Happily switched and never went back.

Perhaps I get an extra one more junk every other three day or week, but I can definitely live with that without giving a single penny to Google.