Your iCloud account includes an email address in the icloud.com domain (as well as grandfathering in those with addresses in the me.com domain and, in some cases, also mac.com addresses—refer back to About Your Apple ID for more details). You get 5 GB of free storage (shared with other iCloud services), push email updates to your iOS device, and a lovely Web interface for checking your mail. iCloud Mail also has several subtle but important improvements from its MobileMe predecessor.

In this chapter, I review iCloud Mail’s benefits and walk you through the basics of setting it up and using it on various platforms.