Abysmal Services

“It ended up overheating my phone battery to the point it could no longer hold a charge.”

Okay buddy, sure. It doesn’t even matter which service this is about, that’s just silly.

The problem is that they all "mostly work" but not fully work. Like you, I've had issues with iMessage syncing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And one of my computers displays "29 unread messages" but when selecting "unread" nothing shows. With no way to know the current state of syncing and no way to push "sync now" I just have to deal with the frustration.

It's the death by a thousand cuts. Apple doesn't care any more.

He didn't even mention the ridiculous PITA that is Shortcuts sync conflicts.

Don't worry, I'm sure another re-branding will solve everything. (Younger folks: see iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe. I had no reason to believe they'd get it right the fourth time around.)

Watch the problem-ridden iTools demo at Macworld San Francisco 2000. Nothing has changed. I use iMessage and nothing else. The hardware is great. Everything else is a disaster and nobody at Apple seems to notice or care.

Plug: a third-party IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV service is well worth the money.

The main problem, as with the "Locked Out of Apple Developer Accounts" sibling post, is that there is nothing you can do about this. These companies are moving all of their customers to their cloud services, locking them in, and then slowly degrading these services, and there is no recourse. You hope that things magically resolve themselves, and they probably usually do, but sometimes they don't, and then you're just screwed.

You can't call or email anyone who has any power to do anything for you.

This is why I'm moving as much as possible to self-hosting. Things can still go wrong, but at least now I can do something about it.

@Plume +1

Google Photos is the poster child of this.

I was soooo delighted when that launched, and I'm still a big fan. But free became payed became full of duplicate copies because my wife wants access to all photos and maybe I don't understand how to do that properly but right now I share all vacation picuters and that menas we pay twice for each in the family plan and it's just ....

On the other hand. Back when I had a NAS in the cupboard that was a right nightmare to.

I've stopped using iCloud, except for syncing contacts, and that does occasionally just fail to work.

The only real syncing service I'm using at this point is Nextcloud, self hosted by me, which isn't great, but it at least does its one main job well enough. But it's not like I can recommend self hosting to just anyone.

@Bri: Not to mention the low level constant dread about losing everything if you bork something or your house burns down. Admittedly, losing synced files is kind of the least of your problems if your house burns down, but it has kept me from self-hosting Bitwarden, etc. I can't afford to lose my house AND my ability to access every account I have, insurance for example.

"Not to mention the low level constant dread about losing everything if you bork something"

You can also lose things when they're hosted by somebody else in their cloud. So, either way, you need to have a backup strategy. IMO, it's way easier to back up your own Vaultwarden data than to back up something like 1Password (which, as far as I know, has no automatic backup functionality built-in).

I've never felt safer about my data. I back up all the data from one NAS to another on-site NAS and all of my important data to a Filen account. At some point, I'll probably drop off another NAS at a family member's and sync things to that, too. With Tailscale, this kind of thing has become borderline trivial.

Self-hosting has become much easier than in the past, and the services available—things like Immich, hoarder, or Vaultwarden—have become much better, to the point where they are better than many services provided by A-tier cloud providers.

Obviously, I still wouldn't tell any random person to stop using Google Drive and self-host their data, but anyone reading this blog can do this in half a weekend.

@gildarts:

If disaster strikes and your house is gone, then it's entirely possible your phone will be gone as well. There are some passwords that you simply have to commit to memory - the one for the email address you use to register on your banking/insurance/etc websites, the one for your apple (for ios) or google (for android) account is another. And for some things, (the data on your phone, for instance) using cloud backup (as a final line of defence) is essential as well.

In a worst case situation, you need to be able to get a new phone up and running with your old number, get access to your email account, and only then will you be able to regain access to all the online accounts which have random passwords that were backed up on devices that are now gone.

@Plume 1Password got rid of the built-in automatic local backup feature?

@gildarts This is why I use a cloud backup provider, Backblaze specifically. So I have my local backups using Time Machine along with my cloud backup. I'd never rely on just one backup provider to work, and have had many instances where one failed and so I needed the other. And that's all on top of what's being synced between my devices.

I'm still using 1Password 7 and am going to stick with it as long as I possibly can, since I still haven't found anything I actually like more. (Though I never tried Strongbox.) And that means I can back up my password vault using Time Machine and Backblaze, so that's fairly secure too.

>1Password got rid of the built-in automatic local backup feature

I don't know. I opened it on my Mac and looked through the settings and menus, but I could not find an automatic backup feature. There's a one-time export feature; that's all I found.

@Plume There used to be a whole Backups tab in the Preferences window. It would back up at least once a day and you could easily pick one to restore from. From what I’m reading, it looks like now it only does automatic backups in the cloud account.

Yeah, that doesn't exist in my 1Password, version 8.10.70.

Self-host email, sure. Why not? He's right, iCloud email is terrible (source: me, recovering addict). An AS Mac Mini running your email server stack in a VM will work great. Use Arq to back up the VM to Wasabi, and put the credentials in a plain text file stored in iCloud Drive (but not the encryption password, obviously).

And I used to be terrified as well, but I realised this was basically because of the trauma caused by HW failures in the past. Yes things can go wrong, but you only live once on this earth and so long as your data's backed up safely you have nothing to fear from HW failure because in the absolute worst case you can find another host (managed or otherwise). And, really, you *do* have more important things to worry about if your house burns down. You are most certainly not your email. The big players have been very successful in raising expectations, and yes there are clearly cases where it just makes more sense to recommend hosted services to others, but they are not infallible or special, and the commodification of compute resources ironically means that you have more power now than ever (despite, yes, the hardship of getting delivery working out of the gate). I used to self-host, and am happy to be doing it again.

Hi Sebby. I use iCloud with a custom domain, which might be the worst of all worlds

Can I ask why you use a VM to host your mail?

I've got a new Mac mini and I'm considering self-hosting but to be honest I wouldn't know where to start these days - the last time I self-hosted was around 2003'

Hi Tony and sorry for the lateness of the reply!

I still have iCloud catch-alls for a couple of my domains that now mostly get spam. It's not totally useless and I can see myself using it as a backup if I urgently needed access to my email and my hosts were offline for a long time, but it's clearly pretty mediocre, at best a nice-to-have. Certainly the spam filtering is hard to justify for serious use, especially if you want to interact with non-dominant providers, because it's so very aggressive.

The choice of a VM was almost coincidental: I had this M2 Pro Mini on my desk and it wasn't doing very much. Also, trying to run Linux bare-metal on earlier Minis was either difficult or hard to justify for the power consumption and fan noise. In the end, when you've got the power in the machine you already have, why not use it? I'm seriously thinking of turning it into a router too, if the performance will allow it to NAT and route at up to 3 GBPS. And as I said, backup of an appliance is now straightforward, so you can put everything in one box (that runs Linux, so also automatically updating and with good packaging) and easily be able to recover. Virtualisation has never looked so attractive, really.

That having been said, your query sent me off on one of my periodic assessments of the email server landscape, especially for macOS, and there are now really serious options for all-in-one email self-hosting using contained and centralised storage for configuration, emails and data, so the use of a VM for that reason might be much less necessary. Maddy and Mox (written in Go) and Stalwart (written in Rust) are now easily installed and maintained on macOS (just download binaries or use homebrew) so you might be tempted to look at those options instead of a complex stack of pieces with highly brittle macOS-specific setup.

And yes, my self-hosting journey also ended about the time you did (2006?). It's amazing really, the software hasn't changed that much, at least not the email-related portions of it, but all the plumbing, the operational practices, and the email environment have become much, much more austere. I don't blame people for not wanting to self-host email, because so much of it tests your faith in humanity, but it's absolutely still possible. You just need to keep your head.

HTH