discovered another useful tool to manage this horror story of multiple apple IDs. mostly helpful for somebody that catches the goof early enough.
If your primary email address is stuck to your secondary apple ID, (often you won't even know, because it is possible to DETACH the email but you can not re-attach as a primary email to a different apple ID), then there is a workaround to at least get email notices going to the proper email.
so in my case, i could not use my primary email as a new apple ID because it was assigned to my non-email apple ID. I MOVED my primary email address to my secondary ID and added an ALIAS email to my primary apple ID.
i discovered today that I was able to use 'email plus' to add my primary email to my primary apple id, here is how:
say your apple id is fred@company.com but you are not allowed to add fred@company.com to your apple id as the primary email. This is most likely because you have a secondary apple id that once-upon-a-time you had fred@company.com as a primary email. you can delete the email but it's still LOCKED to that account.
the workaround is this: using an "address TAG" you can effectively assign your primary email to your primary apple id, and here's how: an address tag is also refered to as sub-addressing in some systems.
send yourself a test email to make sure YOUR service works with tags; some use minus while most use plus .
set your primary email *and* apple id to: fred+cloud@company.com
you will have to use the signin fred+cloud@apple.com but it will be tied to your tried and true primary apple id. you shoud also be able to assign your primary email (fred@company.com) as a secondary email on your primary apple id as long as you delete it from any others first.
the benefit of this solution is two fold:
1) email notices associated with the primary apple ID will deliver to your normal email account w/o having to set up an alias.
2) find my friend or other email-based services will tie your primary email address to your primary apple id so you can use just ONE apple id on all your devices.
hope that helps somebody out there.
in MY case, i decided to SPLIT my services
- all cloud services moved to my secondary apple id that is my mobile me address
- added my primary email to my secondary apple id so find-my-friends works properly
- my iTunes stays with my PRIMARY apple ID but now has the primary email address with the tag format or alias, so my purchase receipts etc still deliver to my primary email address.
so it's kludgy and stoopid that it's needed but it's a decent workaround especially for those of us with priceless non-email apple IDs.
I host my email for my domain with google apps so i have to use the + tag in my case.