Smartphone talk

[chuft]

There's a topic for computers, but phones are a huge part of our everyday lives these days, so why not one for phones.


Due to the avalanche of spam I am now getting on my ISP accounts, and spam phone calls as well where they read me back my email, I have decided to migrate my email onto a cloud service. This will also make it easier to move eventually as every time I move, I have to get a new ISP and new emails and change everything over in every site I use.

iCloud Mail lets you create throwaway addresses as relays for things like fast food apps that you never compose an email to, and it also lets you have up to three aliases at a time that will go to your real mailbox, which you never give out. If somebody sells your email address or it ends up on the dark web due to some business or other getting hacked, you can just drop that alias and make a new one to drop off the radar of bad guys.

GMail has this functionality but since Google scans your emails and sells the data/trains AI's on it, I prefer a more private service. Proton seems to be webmail only and thus a real pain to try to archive locally. So I decided to try iCloud, given Apple's privacy systems and reputation, and the fact it is supposed to work seamlessly with iPhone Mail.

I set it up, plus my first alias. It is IMAP only so I set up Thunderbird on my PC to be able to get its emails, which I can then copy and paste to a Local Folder in Thunderbird to archive them, and not have to leave everything on a cloud server all the time.

Everything seemed to be working great until today I decided to try testing my iCloud email on my iPhone.

I have several ISP accounts and an iCloud account set up on my phone like so. Obviously these are not the real addresses, but are named so it is clear what is going on.

[email protected] (Default Sender in Mail settings)
[email protected]

[email protected]
[email protected]


Note I am not using threading.


Test 1: I tried sending an email from [email protected] to [email protected] and it showed up fine in my iCloud inbox.

I then tried replying to it from the iCloud mailbox, and it put the To address as [email protected]. Yes it wants to reply to itself, not to the sender. I was like what. It had [email protected] as both sender and receiver.

I Canceled and tried replying to it again and this time it in addition to putting the To address as alias1@icloud,com, it also put the From address as [email protected]. So the same set of addresses as the incoming mail had.



Test 2: I tried sending an email from [email protected] to [email protected], no iCloud involved. As soon as I chose [email protected] as the recipient, Mail changed the sender from [email protected] to [email protected].



So Mail is just changing things as you try to write emails, changing senders and/or recipients, sometimes after you hit Send. This is bad. It stops if I disable iCloud mail on the phone, so it seems directly related to iCloud Mail somehow.

I Googled around and have found others having similar problems, over many years. Never saw a solution. I have found that the Settings app actually crashes if I try to look at too many Mail settings. I manually checked for an iOS update and updated to 18.6, but this does not solve the problems.

Curious if anyone else has had such experiences with iCloud Mail.

[boredjedi]

I just use my phone for the camera and the texting. That's pretty much it. Do mostly everything else on the Desktop.

Surprised about Apple with the iCloud mail. Always thought they were on top of things.

[chuft]

If I didn't have to work I would just use my desktop as well. But it is very useful to get private emails during the workday. Even when not working it is useful to have email with me, for example a plane or train ticket or reservation number, rental car reservation, etc. Some sites use it for 2 factor authentication. I get notifications from my bank about withdrawals.

[LazyPooky]

I don't use iCloud, so I can't comment on that, but it's odd that the senders and/or recipients is changing, must be a bug. The only email provider I have on my phone is Google's. It's an email address for non-essential things.

I have personal email addresses hosted by a Dutch hosting provider, not my internet provider. So if I move or get a different internet connection, everything will continue to work. Just like you want to do, or have started doing, with iCloud. There's no mobile web app for email, so I can't check my email on my phone unless I use the mobile browser, but I don't do that. I use my desktop for checking mail. On my phone I communicate via text messages (Signal) or phone calls. That's the most secure way for me.

[possessor]

I don't have problems with iCloud because I use an Android.

[chuft]

I found my old iPhone 6s and was going to wipe it and get rid of it, but just in case I tried the camera again with a closeup shot. (The camera on my last phone, a 13 mini, was terrible at closeups.) Well the 6s camera is still far better for closeups than even my current phone, an iPhone 15.

This is really disappointing, despite two big lenses instead of one tiny one the 15 is vastly inferior at taking closeup photos. I wonder why they did away with the great camera in the 6s in the later models.