iCloud mail+ for heavy users

[Evamaco]

I want to switch all my emails to iCloud, and I'm searching for feedback about iCloud Mail from heavy users, but it's hard to find professional opinions. I own more than 10 domains and have over 20 email accounts, all hosted on servers. Since I receive about 100K emails every year, which take up about 100GB per year, servers costs become very expensive. I have more than 1 TB of emails, and every email is quite important to me, I can't delete them and I need a fast search option for more than one million of emails.
5 domains are the most important, and iCloud+ would be perfect for these. Some time ago, I heard about silent filters causing some emails to disappear. I tested this and initially thought it was correct, but now I've discovered that it was due to my domain's server configuration, not Apple. So I found a way to avoid these 'silent filters,' and everything has been smooth so far in my testing.
I don't know how it will be in real life, especially since this involves business. I can't afford any mistakes, so I need to hear your comments and thoughts.
ProtonMail is a good option, but they don't have fast searching since all your emails are encrypted on their servers, allowing you to search only the subject of the emails, not their contents. This is not suitable for me. Microsoft Exchange is not an option in my case since they charge for every account. I've never tried only Google Workspace but I don't like gmail interface.

 

[coffeemilktea]

Depending on how much mail you send/receive daily, I suspect you may run into some issues with iCloud Mail's limits. 🤔

 

[Evamaco]

It's not so much, I send about 100 emails daily but add 8 persons on cc, this is max per day.

 

[EdwardC]

I've been using iCloud for my business for the last 20 years (however long it has been iCloud) and pay for 50GB of storage for it. I suspect I get around 50-100 emails a day. I didn't realize there was limit? Anyhow it works quite well. I forward them to my Outlook address as well for a back up.

 

[LeeW]

It's not so much, I send about 100 emails daily but add 8 persons on cc, this is max per day.

You won't have any issues with that. How many you send is more of an issue than how many you receive. They don't care how much is arriving. The purpose, of course, is to prevent you from using the service for mail spam.

 

[EdwardC]

This is from Apple:

Limits on sending messages​

There are several safeguards in place to make sure that only iCloud members can send messages using iCloud. One of these safeguards includes reasonable limits on:

• The total number of messages you can send each day (1,000 messages)
• The number of recipients you can message each day (1,000 recipients)
• The maximum number of recipients per message (500 recipients)
• The size of incoming and outgoing messages (20 MB, up to 5 GB with Mail Drop turned on)

They say there is no limit on incoming other than the size of your storage.

 

[svenmany]

I would check out Fastmail. It's very powerful and usable. You can have unlimited domains of your own. It works well using Apple Mail on macOS and iOS. They support private email addresses. They also have a partnership with 1Password which automates the use of private emails. (I don't use that feature.) The web interface is great - I use it when I want to control the send from email address, since it makes it so easy.

 

[Evamaco]

But is the storage limit of FastMail only 100GB?
Actually, this isn't about price, storage, etc. Another thing is that I don't want to enter 20 email account passwords every year after I get a new iPhone or MacBook. I wish to fill one password and get all my emails ready...
AND I want to be sure that I will receive not 99.99% of emails, but 100% of them. In worst scenarios some emails can be found in the SPAM box, etc., but they can't just disappear.

 

[ipaqrat]

With that scale of workload (bookeeping? legal? lobbying? foreign relations? big family?), and if retention and indexing were critical, then web-based mail services are like playing with fire - single points of failure with no recourse. Multiple service providers WOULD diversity your risks, somewhat, which is worth a little something. PII content might also be a liability concern if the service host were pwned. Would you even know if the host were pwned?

In this scenario, consider offloading mail from ISPs to an on-premises database, which needn't be an eMail server at all. eMail servers are lousy databases. For example...

1. Build a little server (linux) with a dozen-ish terabyte RAID 10 and a UPS (not as costly as it sounds).
2. Run Splunk with mail intake TAs (Technical Add-Ons), or automate export of messages to text and use a heavy forwarder to pick up the data.
3. Splunk doesn't incorporate binary objects (i.e., attachments) in its indexes, so you'd probably need a script to store attachments and index their locations
4. Splunk ain't particularly cheap, but it IS designed for "Big Data" in volume way bigger than the OP's use case.
5. Splunk is ostensibly a SIEM (Security Information Event Management)(pronounced SIM), but it can index ANY kind of text data. It's often used for way more than security incidents.
6. Splunk is blazing fast.
7. Splunk ain't a walk in the park to configure, but it's super reliable once you get it going.

I tend to over-engineer for fun. There are other database alternatives easier than Splunk, especially if you are on your own and not an IT engineer.

 

[grammatica]

The Apple Mail app is good, but the service sucks. There are limited setting in regards to managing domains, email addresses, aliases, etc. Go with a dedicated email provider.