Tired of 1000 email addresses because of Apple's nonsense

[JtheLemur]

OK, not 1000, but like, three. This is super aggravating at this point, and gonna vent.

See here: ?

Here's the deal: I've had my "Apple email" forever. Had it through the mac.com days, the me.com days, and the iCloud.com days.

A million years ago, I used the mac.com one. A few thousand years ago when that died, I used the me.com one, and have only used that one ever since. I use it to sign into everything Apple. Everything. I never type the letters mac.com or iCloud.com.

But.

No matter what, without fail, Apple will constantly, everywhere, automatically, insert either MULTIPLE (above) or VARIANTS (below) of my email address.

☝️ See that? I literally did not type this in. I only ever use the me.com address.

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Here's where this becomes a material, not a cosmetic, problem:

The other day, in an attempt to stop my damn iOS Mail.app from creating new emails randomly from my never-used icloud.com address variant, I went about logging into the iCloud web interface to turn them off in its web-based Mail there (which is an INSANE way to do this, but whatever).

Hooray, now in iOS Mail.app, I can only create mail from me.com.

While I was at it, I also turned off all the "unused" emails for "you can be contacted" in Messages, as you can see from the screenshot above. Mostly just as an attempt to clean things up and consolidate yet again.

But… this had the disastrous effect of making it so that a bunch of messages sent to me were never received, despite all of these emails being associated with a single account.

So I turned them all back on, and am hoping for the best.

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Anyway. All of this is f***ing awful. It's a terrible, confusing experience. There is no reason that this should happen at all. Yet it has, for years, and years, and it's finally actually screwed something up rather than just be terrible and confusing.

• You should never have a situation where you enter one credential, and it changes underneath you.
• You should never have what are effectively a bunch of aliases for a single account, not direct messaging to that single account.
• All of this - every part, from cosmetic to functional - just should not be happening at all.

Anyone have a fix for this crap? T___T Why the heck do I end up with actual communication issues for Apple's marketing & domain changes to its email systems? Rawwwwwrrrrr

 

[iStorm]

While I was at it, I also turned off all the "unused" emails for "you can be contacted" in Messages, as you can see from the screenshot above. Mostly just as an attempt to clean things up and consolidate yet again.

But… this had the disastrous effect of making it so that a bunch of messages sent to me were never received, despite all of these emails being associated with a single account.

So I turned them all back on, and am hoping for the best.

Yeah, this can be confusing. Messages are sent to those addresses/numbers, not the "account". So if someone has a conversation thread that is using your email address, you won't get messages in that conversation anymore once you turn it off. You (or they) will need to start a new conversation thread using your number.

Because of this, I always be sure to uncheck the email addresses and leave only my phone number checked when setting up a new device...and also making sure new conversations I start are sent using my phone number.

There's really no fix other than ripping the bandaid off by disabling those email addresses again, and start a new conversation thread using your phone number. It might be rough at first, but should be better in the long run.

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I have a similar situation with all these email addresses/aliases too. Many years ago, I created an Apple ID using my @msn.com email addresses. I foolishly created a 'me.com' and 'icloud.com' email/alias for this Apple ID. I don't use them and would love to be able to remove them. Hopefully Apple gives us this capability soon. Many other online services let us delete our aliases or shut down our email accounts.

 

[MacGizmo]

Part of the problem is that Apple only offers iCloud.com email addresses, and the old .Mac and .Me addresses are merely alias account the point to iCloud.com now. But you can still use them as though they are still fully functional email/IDs.

They did this so people wouldn't lose their old usernames during the transition from .Mac to .Me and .Me to iCloud.com, but it has made for a very confusing system for many, many people. To further the problem, some accounts must use the address of .Mac or .Me respectively, for billing purposes, even though those accounts actually live under and point to the main iCloud.com account. I believe iTunes still works this way, but I'm not 100% sure.