When Google announced it was going to shut down its legacy free email for domains, I decided to  use iCloud+ to manage the mail from seanreiser.com since I was paying for it anyway. I set it up but it's been working fine as a mail server. I had been running sendmail off my web server to send mail from my site when I needed to. In order to avoid spam folders,I decided to move to using SMTP, which meant I needed to authenticate to Apple's SMTP Server.

At first, I had a problem authenticating, until I realized that your email addresses at your custom domain is an aliase, so you need to authenticate with your iCloud account and an App-Specific Password. I'm using Drupal 9;s SMTP Authentication Support  Module.  Here are the parameters I used on /admin/config/system/smtp:

SMTP server settings

• SMTP server - smtp.mail.me.com
• SMTP port - 587
• Use encrypted protocol - TLS // SSL didn't work
• Enable TLS encryption automatically - On
• Timeout - 300
• Turn on the SMTP keep alive feature - Off

SMTP Authentication

• Username - Use your iCloud email address, not the alias from your custom domain
• Password - an App-Specific Password. 

E-mail options​​​​​​

• E-mail from address - The email alias from your custom domain.
• E-mail from name - The name you want on the from line
• Allow to send e-mails formatted as HTML - up to your use case

Everything else leave as is. I'd do a test with debugging turned on and then turn it off. I also used the mail system module to redirect all mail to SMTP.

Good luck, Share and  enjoy!

Image

 Finally made some progress on the feed system. Got everything installed in dev, added a few feeds and I've got stuff importing.

To support title-less feeds, in the mapping for the feed I just put a constant on the title, and then in hook_entity_presave, I'm testing to see if the feed item title is populated and if not I grab the first 200 characters of the feed item description.  

Next I need to build some a View to support the River of News style interface.

As I remembered, the Aggregator Module does not support feed items without titles, so I suspect that the Feeds Module will be the way to go.  I'll spend some time today thinking about that.

 Although I haven't put keyboard to code editor yet, I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about the new feed processing system for my personal feed reader. Back when I built the original feed system and Drupal 7,  feed items from the aggregator module weren't entities.  Now that they are entities in Drupal 9, they are fieldable, so I can do far more with the items than I could a few years ago, so maybe I can get away with using the aggregator module instead of the feeds module. However, as memory serves. the aggregator module did not handle title-less items very well. That might not take a big deal to some but some of my fields on my feeds have title-less posts. If you can't picture a title-less post imagine a tweet or better yet this post which has no title it is just a body. I'll have to do some testing to see how well it can be handled.

Also I'm giving a lot of thought to whether I want to add the feed reader to this site or if I wanted to leave it on its own Drupal instance. Having it all in one site will make support and maintenance easier at the cost of some performance because I have a number of modules turned on to support the feeds Bajwa that I don't need today. Another thing to consider, if I ever decided to go back to hosting the site at Pantheon or some other cloud platform, I'll have increased fees to host it.

Lots of little things to consider.