My friend, I am officially in love with you! That is, after reading your spacious post above. Every single word in it — it is really I who wrote it. Ridiculous as it seems to be replying to a post dated Oct 11, 2012 10:22 AM, on Sep 6, 2016 4:37 PM, so it's four years old.
Nevertheless, with zero warning, altering no obvious iCloud settings, yesterday I realized I was not getting any emails delivered to my account@icloud.com address! For several fricking months... I did make my @icloud.com address primary over @me and @mac, long time ago, driven by advice in iCloud.com's UI hints and in Apple's KBs, presumably making the older addresses aliases!
Unaware that this has been an issue earlier, very-very apple-loving at the time, feeling confident, as usual: "If anyone, I can trust Mother Apple to not let me down with such thing an essential thing as e-mail...", I set my @icloud address as target for several important service notifications... Why wouldn't I, given it was the only email service that supported PUSH, for quite a while. I even used it as a reliable "master" address for a couple services, which I'm now struggling to access.
My trusty and caring Apple has knifed me in the back, three times in a row, one after another:
1. I hate my 16GB iPhone 6 Plus. "I'm a bit short on budget atm, and Apple can't possibly make an iPhone I won't love, right?" This is the most annoying, irritating and unusable device I've owned for many years. I've come to feel rage, fury, every time I see the "low on space" dialog. This very closely reminds me of a Windows 6 Samsung "smartphone" I had. The one that made me give up the windows world and buy my first iPhone: having learned by heart six hundred places with configuration options, having tried all possible combinations — I was never able to connect to Wi-Fi, a game-changer I purchased it for. Then also, ~5 minutes to show contacts, ~3 for recent calls + ~4 to parse known numbers, ~7 minutes to launch messages, and 95% of calls missed because, you know... 30 seconds — 2 minutes to render the "Incoming call!" dialog with two buttons. Apple, you should have never made the 16GB iPhone 6.
2. OS X Server 5 app has been a complete disappointment, one of the biggest wastes of $19 for software. Nothing like the good-old-times mac servers, this one is crippled and buggy, failing for stupidest reasons, right after perfectly clean fresh installs of OS X + Server App and nothing else.
3. I hardly recover from the server app shock, only to learn that my primary iCloud email address has been silently f****d for months, and then online support tells me to instead talk to support at developers.apple.com, which I have been unfortunate to access with my iCloud ID. I can almost physically sense the rant, rage, and rivers of anger that would have been unleashed at Gmail, had it malfunctioned like this for just a couple of hours. I am **** sure it would've been followed by thousands excuses from Google, and measures to never ever let happen again. On the other hand, after 4 years, Apple has even acknowledged it?! No KB? Anything? I really feel these are the last bits.