- Did you know you can get your own
(tranquil ambient music) custom email address
from Apple for just 99 cents a month?
Imagine having your own email,
like christiancraylormade.com directly on your iPhone,
conveniently integrated into iCloud and completely custom.
This sounds great, but how does it work?
This video is sponsored by Aura, more on that later.
Getting a custom email address
is a feature of Apple's iCloud's Plus subscription.
Starting at 99 cents a month,
you can get 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage
and the ability to connect a domain name
to get a custom iCloud email.
You've always gotten a free icloud.com
or me.com email address by default
when signing up for iCloud.
This feature allows you to bring your own domain name
to create a custom email like christian@craylormade.com.
Custom iCloud emails have been available in iCloud Plus
since the release of iOS 15 last year.
This year, Apple is building on the feature with iOS 16
and allowing you to purchase a brand new domain name
from right in the app.
Let me show you how it works.
The process is pretty simple,
we tried it in the iOS 16 beta
and all you do is open the settings app on your iPhone,
go to "Profile", go to "iCloud",
go to "Custom Email Domain".
And from here, you can buy a new domain.
Apple sell these domains to their partner,
which is CloudFlare
and CloudFlare is a DNS management system
and they offer enterprise products to companies.
Don't let that scare you out of it though,
it's actually really simple to purchase a domain name.
And the thing I love about CloudFlare
is that they don't charge any profit.
They sell a domain to you at wholesale pricing.
So CloudFlare isn't profiting,
Apple's not profiting on the sale of a domain
and it's really simple to get started.
Once you purchase your domain,
it basically just walks you through a setup wizard
of choosing your email address.
I could say christian@craylormade.com, hit "Next",
walk through a couple really easy steps
and your email address is good to go.
It functions just like the free iCloud email address you get
and you can access it right in the Apple mail app.
The process is a bit more complicated
to add your custom email to a third party email client.
I use an app called Spark
and I had to actually add my free iCloud email
and then go in and add my custom email as an alias.
Then I could have it sent from the alias
and my custom email worked as expected,
but it was a lot of extra steps
and a bit of a headache to get this set up.
If you're an iPhone user, but you don't use a Mac,
you can check your email on icloud.com,
they have a web client that works pretty well,
or you can still use IMAP and SMTP
to link your regular iCloud email to any email client,
you'll probably just have to add an alias like I said.
I'm also not sure how great this sharing feature is.
You're supposed to be able to share your custom domain name
with other Apple users
so they can create their own email address
on that same domain.
This is great for families or small businesses.
If you want to have all your employees
have theirname@yourbusiness.com as the email address,
that's what this is for.
However, in testing, we weren't able to get this to work.
My producer bought a custom domain name
and he tried sharing it with my Apple ID.
I never got a notification from Apple.
I never saw it in the settings app.
And to this day,
I still don't have my custom email on his shared domain.
I will say that you're able to share it
directly with any Apple ID
and it's not restricted to Apple's family sharing feature.
I won't get into the specifics of family sharing,
but if you know you know,
family sharing can be a pain in the butt,
but thankfully with this feature,
you just put in their Apple ID
and that's all it takes to share the domain with them.
So while Apple makes it easy in iOS 16
to buy a brand new domain name
and link it with your custom email,
I think this feature is best suited for solo users
who prefer using the default Apple mail app.
I think the perfect use case for this feature
is those who already subscribed to iCloud Plus,
making it effectively free to use.
Sure, you do have the extra cost of buying a domain name,
but you'd face that cost with any custom email solution.
Just note that iCloud email addresses
do count against your iCloud storage limit.
So emails in your inbox
will take up some of your iCloud space.
Even if you don't already subscribe to iCloud Plus,
subscribing to the base 50 gigabyte plan
for 99 cents a month
might be worth it for this feature alone.
You'll also get the added benefit
of additional iCloud storage
and access to the private relay feature.
But seriously, spending 99 cents per month
for custom email hosting by Apple
and you can host multiple inboxes on multiple domains,
it's a steal.
To give you an idea of how great a deal this is,
Google offers custom email hosting powered by Gmail.
For this, they charge $6 per inbox per month.
So if you want three inboxes,
that's $18 a month spent on email hosting.
You could do the same thing with apple for 99 cents a month,
or take Microsoft email hosting.
To get an email powered by Outlook,
they charge $4 a month billed annually
and that's just for one inbox.
Each additional inbox is another $4 a month,
or you could go to Apple, spend 99 cents a month
and have as many inboxes as you want.
I do wanna point out that Google
and Microsoft's email hosting solutions
are definitely superior for corporations.
For large entities that need enterprise features,
easy email onboarding
and the ability to manage 100s of email addresses,
those solutions are a better fit.
iCloud custom email hosting is definitely basic,
but it's a good fit for someone
who wants a custom email address on a budget
and you don't need 500 emails.
And if you're not an Apple user
or you want something that's a better fit
for third party email clients,
definitely check out NameCheap's private email hosting.
I've used this service for several years,
it's just $15 a year for an inbox,
and it's a decent, reliable option.
Just keep in mind that it doesn't have that Apple magic
and it's not as easy to set up.
I also think there's something to be said
for the reliability of an Apple hosted email.
It's not some small hosting company,
and a tech giant like Apple knows how to run email servers.
I'm willing to bet that Apple's own employees
probably use this same hosting solution.
Getting an email of this caliber
at such an affordable price, honestly blows my mind.
Support for custom emails and iCloud Plus is live right now
when you connect an existing domain name,
and you'll be able to purchase a new domain name
through CloudFlare from right in the app,
starting with the release of iOS 16 this fall.
New domains purchased from the settings app
will be added to your CloudFlare account
and you can use this domain down the road
for connecting it to a website or other purposes.
I love seeing Apple's commitment
to simplicity with this feature.
It's Apple's attempt
at an elegant solution to a complex problem.
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With that said, I'll catch you guys next time.