How do I connect iCloud Mail?

Apple will not accept your Apple Account password from a mail app, so you generate a separate app-specific password for CloakFeed. It takes about a minute.

Before you start

You need two-factor authentication switched on for your Apple Account, and an active @icloud.com address. Without 2FA, Apple does not offer app-specific passwords.

Steps

1. Open account.apple.com in your browser and sign in.
2. Go to Sign-In and Security › App-Specific Passwords and tap Generate an app-specific password.
3. Type a name you will recognise later — "CloakFeed" is fine — and confirm. Copy the password Apple shows you; it is shown once.
4. In CloakFeed, tap + at the top of Home and choose Sync with iCloud Mail (or go to Settings › Integrations and tap Connect next to iCloud Mail). Enter your full iCloud address, paste the password, and tap Connect.

What happens next

Tap Find my newsletters. CloakFeed connects from your phone straight to Apple's mail server over an encrypted connection and reads the last 90 days of your inbox first. You confirm which senders are newsletters before anything is saved.

After that, new mail is checked automatically in the background, and older mail arrives a batch at a time until it reaches the start of your mailbox. To limit syncing to particular newsletters, use Settings › Integrations › Sync from. Mail is opened read-only, so nothing in iCloud is marked read, moved or deleted.

Nothing syncs to a CloakFeed server, because there is not one — what arrives stays in the app's private storage on the device, and the password itself goes into your phone's keystore.

To stop syncing, go to Settings › Integrations and tap Disconnect, which deletes the password from the keystore. Revoking it on the Apple page above cuts access immediately.

If sign-in is rejected

Use the full address including @icloud.com, and paste the app-specific password rather than your Apple Account password. An alias or a custom domain routed through iCloud will not work here — sign in with the primary iCloud address instead.