Just wanted to give an update regarding our Early Testers program for our new Elements Hosting service.
We received quite a lot of interest from the community, and I’m happy to report that everybody who requested Early Access on the forum, or contacted me through DM or email, has been added to the Early Testers list and will receive an Early Access spot!
Also wanted to let everybody know, we’re going to be providing a very generous testing period for our Early Testers at a very generous pricing point (I think it rhymes with she, see, me… )
At this time, due to the high demand, we are no longer accepting new Early Tester requests. We’ve got quite a list and over the coming weeks we will be onboarding y’all in waves.
I will be sending out an email in the coming days to everybody who’s on the Early Testers list with more details and so forth. If you have any questions in the meantime feel free to ask here, or send over a DM or email.
Thanks so much everybody for all the interest in our new Elements Hosting service! It’s truly heartwarming and we hope y’all will be really pleased with our service and support.
First recommendation: Fastmail (Individual or Business) - Great support, lots of features, nice looking interface if using their webmail client or apps.
Second recommendation: Zoho Mail (Business) - So-so support, also lots of features, cheap (free tier 5GB with 1 custom domain name, affordable plans after that). For those that don’t need to communicate with support too much and know how to navigate and set up an email account. Also has datacenters all around the world so you can choose your data residency (including EU).
We can help with basic stuff for both email providers like account set up and configuration and features, as we have experience with both. This is in the event you’d rather ask us than their support. Please note we wouldn’t be able to assist with in-depth technical analysis as we don’t work there and don’t have access to their email servers.
Other option a fellow forum member found out yesterday, iCloud mail with custom domains works too on the Contact Form in Elements, which is cool. I haven’t tried it yet but I might to see what it’s all about. iCloud mail could be a solid option if you already have an iCloud+ or Apple One account.
For the privacy conscious, there’s ProtonMail and Tuta Mail (both EU based) but I think Tuta has some limitations.
That’s just a few off the top of my head. Others can chime in if they have recommendations for solid email hosting providers.
Thanks heads up I’ll invesitgate these options. I have. alot of email accounts so I need something that can handle all of them. Although I might have to scale back on them.
I’ll need to check out iCloud as I have an account and an Apple One account.
With iCloud, you can set up to 5 custom domains and 3 email addresses per domain. With their family sharing, you can also set up I believe up to 5 family members on your domains, if they also have an iCloud account, if I’m understanding that right.
I don’t use the family sharing, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to that part.
I have been trying to get one of my domains set up to work with iCloud, but there are records that they want to see updated at the domain registrar (Chillidog) that don’t seem to exist on the domain.
Would it be possible to use my own custom domain for emails? I mean, if I stay with my domain at my current provider but just use elements hosting for … well … hosting the site.
Yep that’s possible if your current provider offers email hosting.
You’d just point your website’s DNS records to us, and your email DNS records to your email provider. If you need any help with it we can help you get it all set up correctly.
That will bring you to the zone editor. I recommend you print that to a PDF, just in case.
Then I would add the 5 zones that were in the email Apple sent. Don’t worry about the first line in each, TXT: SPF: MX: DKIM. You need to enter 2 TXT records, 2 MX records and a CNAME record. Where it says Host: @ you need to put the actual domain name with a period on the end, in my case wtbc.net. Once you have those entered, you need to delete any other records that refer to mail and look for one that has “spf” in the Value field.
Once you’ve completed that click the link in the email Apple sent and verify that it is working. Give it a few minutes.
If you need help configuring a form in Elements, let me know and I send you some pics on how to set that up.
@ercross Awesome, I will take look and see if I can get it working. Chillidog have a lot of records associated with the domain, so I hope I can figure out which ones are related to email.
Tried to get this working but clearly I did not get it right as any mail sent to the account that were moved over do not get delivered. The error says something like the user could not be found.
Yes, I had moved three email addresses over that were on the same domain. I went through the move process with iCloud and it sent emails to the account to verify that they were real. All of them got verified, but when testing the one account I got the failure, so I assumed I had done something wrong with the setting of the records.
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