[jhollington]

Originally Posted by camner

I took a brief look at iOS Mail after reading your earlier reply, and I have to say that I agree that it is far better than earlier incarnations. That said, I wasn't wowed enough to say "This is definitely better than the FM app," but perhaps that is due more to familiarity breeding respect rather than contempt!

Well, to each their own to be fair, and of course familiarity counts for something

For me it was primarily the tighter integration and more "native" feel of the built-in iOS Mail app, not to mention that messages are downloaded/synced and saved offline so they can still be accessed when I have no coverage —*I've generally preferred the iOS Mail client's overall UI for years, but obviously early iterations were also more limiting. There are also a few features like "VIP" notifications that aren't even available in most third-party mail apps (e.g. the ability to only get push notifications from specific contacts rather than for every new message — a feature that I find extremely handy).

I briefly toyed with the idea of setting up my own server, but decided against it, as that was heading MORE, rather than less, in the direction of "I am the only one around who has a prayer of maintaining this and without me no one in the family gets email!"

Yup, that was one of the big things that always dissuaded me off and on over the years, along with the fact that I ended up being a victim of the stability of my ISPs home connection and other factors.

What deters me here is that my wife, though on Apple iDevices, has a Windows 10 PC and I need to have a system that allows her to access our joint contacts, our joint calendars, and email. She uses Outlook for email and contacts, and iCloud (web based) for calendaring.

Well, CalDAV and CardDAV are the same protocols used by iCloud, so there aren't a lot of differences whether your use FastMail or iCloud in that respect, other than the web-based interface, and I guess that's a matter of personal preference.

That said, iCloud's implementations do have a couple of advantages for iOS users.... VIP contacts only sync between devices if you're using iCloud — FastMail doesn't seem to support this (yet) and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something Apple-specific hiding under the hood on this one.

iCloud Calendars are also a bit more tightly integrated into iOS as opposed to other CalDAV services, and of course if you're sharing calendars with iCloud users, you'll need an iCloud account to do that anyway.

1. It took me a while to puzzle out how to create one family address book (with separate groups for "mine," "hers," and "ours" contacts). Her iCloud ID is used for all contacts (that's because Outlook and Windows 10 can only sync with one Apple ID via the iCloud sync Apple has created for Windows), and I have her Apple ID set up on my iDevices and the household Macs as an additional iCloud account. Is there a better way to handle this, do you think?

Sadly, that's probably the only real way to handle this with iCloud Contacts in a Windows world. Even in a Mac-only world, you're still dealing with secondary iCloud accounts if you want to share contacts. Hopefully Apple will someday allow contact sharing.

That said, FastMail's CardDAV does support shared address books, so that might be a way to do it more easily. You'd still have to sync them to Outlook in some manner —*sadly, Outlook does not offer any native CardDAV support, but there are several CardDAV plug-ins for Outlook that could work for this purpose.

2. I'm curious what you use on your desktop(s)/laptop(s) for email, calendaring, and contacts. I use BusyCal and BusyContacts, and I'm very happy with both. I currently use Postbox for email, but I'm not thrilled with it. I've tried various other clients (too numerous to list), and haven't really found anything I'm happy with.

I like BusyCal and BusyContacts in principle, and own licenses for both. I used them for a while, but I honestly found them to be more complex than I needed for my purposes, and went back to the standard macOS Calendar and Contacts apps. This is another area in which a few slight improvements — and tighter integration into iOS sync via iCloud — have made a big enough difference, and again I tend to like the cleaner and more minimalist interfaces of these apps. Again, though, my contact/calendaring needs aren't that sophisticated