Roman Böhm

Using a Manitu Domain for iCloud Mail

2023-06-23

Introduction

How to: Set up a custom domain for iCloud mail using a Manitu domain

I’m using the German hoster Manitu for the romanboehm.com domain. I also have an iCloud+ subscription allowing me to use this domain for iCloud mail. I found the process of setting that up quite under-supported on both iCloud and Manitu’s side, so I wanted to document it. A German-speaking blogger named Steven Kaminsky apparently had encountered the same pains in the past, and the linked post was of great help, but I still wanted to quickly persist my notes on the process and highlight potential hiccups with Manitu especially. For my sake and fellow Manitu-with-iCloud+ users'.

Notes

1. For the following instructions I’m going to assume you’ve successfully made it past the initial stages of subscribing to iCloud+ and entering your domain there.

2. Base your changes on the personalized DNS records iCloud+ gave you through email or your iCloud+ domain settings page. They should look like this:

   

3. Common pattern for entering all but the DKIM record on Manitu’s side: Leave the Host part blank. Manitu does not allow you to enter the @ sign. And if you enter your domain, as suggested by iCloud’s support page, Manitu will ask for confirmation whether that’s what you want because then you’d end up with a duplicate host. So, leave it blank, Manitu will automatically fill in e.g. romanboehm.com. as you can verify by again downloading your DNS records later.

   The corresponding entry in you downloaded records file would show

   romanboehm.com. 86400 IN MX	10 mx01.mail.icloud.com.
   

Steps

Now you should be ready to enter the DNS settings you’ve been presented with into Manitu’s Forward DNS settings page. As for the individual changes:

MX

For the MX records, first delete existing MX records. Then go ahead and create the new ones by copy-and-pasting the values which iCloud requires into the Ziel, i.e. target input element. As mentioned, leave the Host input blank.

TXT

For the TXT record given by iCloud, add a new TXT record, copy and paste the value given by iCloud, i.e. the apple-domain=random-characters string. It will appear double-quoted once you save the record, that’s fine! Host: blank.

SPF

For the SPF record, create another TXT record. Only this time, strip the string given to you by iCloud off the quotes. Manitu does the double-quoting here already. You can see the “SPF” TXT record having the value “v=spf1 include:icloud.com ~all” if you did it right. Host: blank.

DKIM

Lastly, for the DKIM record, create a new CNAME record with sig1._domainkey as the Host and the personalized value from the mail sent to you or the personalized instructions page. This is important because should you go by the general support page on custom domains for iCloud mail, it will present to you a value which looks deceivingly close to something you could just paste in, but looking closely, it has an example.com part for the domain. There are people to which this allegedly has happened, and it took them a long time to figure it out…

Finish

After all that, the Manitu DNS page for your domain should look something like this:

Hit Speichern, i.e. save the modifications you’ve just made. Then verify through the iCloud+ custom domain verification mechanism all is to iCloud’s satisfaction. It should be.