Q: Changing Apple Id to be my Icloud email address?

You can't use your@icloud.com address as an Apple ID. Quite apart from anything else you should always have a non-Apple email address associated with the account: if you forget your password or security questions Apple needs another address to send resets to as you woudn't be able to access the iCloud address.

The correct setting for iCloud email is imap.mail.me.com, and smtp.mail.me.com for outgoing; SSL is required in both cases. It sounds as if you are trying to use the old MobileMe settings, and these are dead.

JWBL, I am annoyed by exactly the same issue and there are more and more people complaining. See the discussion I created here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/20844772?ac_cid=op123456#20844772

Roger, your point is that you should always have a non-Apple email address associated with your Apple ID so Apple can send you login information if you lose your password. That is certainly true. But it does not imply that that non-Apple address has to be the name of your Apple ID. And there is even a way to make an iCloud Address the name of your Apple ID: If you create a completely new Apple ID with the initial setup of an iPhone. But that is of course not an option if you already purchased stuff with your existing Apple ID.

It is not a major problem, but it kind of annoys me that I keep seeing my obsolete Gmail address everywhere after I switched to iCloud and it's just a ridiculous limitations I can't see any reason for.

Has anyone found a solution to this yet?

There is not going to be a solution. You cannot use an iCloud address as an Apple ID. You can change the address which forms the ID to something else if you want, but it can't be an iCloud (or @me.com) address. If you are looking for a way round this you are wasting your time.

Roger, that is not true. You can create a new Apple ID with a @icloud.com address through the initial setup process of an iOS device. That is of course not an option if you already have an Apple ID with purchases on, but it shows that Apple genereally allows to have an Apple ID with an @icloud.com address. Apple just does not allow it for people who already had an Apple ID in the pre-iCloud era.

There can't be any imperative technical reason. I think Apple did a sloppy job in the technical design of the infrastructure behind the cloud services. That is a disappointment if you spend a lot of money on Apple products because they promise flawless design (which admittedly they most of the time come very close to).

If you have an @icloud.com address you must already have set up an iCloud account. To do that in the first place you must have an Apple ID, either existing or by creating a new one - and to create a new one you can't use an iCloud address because you haven't got one. If you already have an iCloud account with an @icloud.com address you can't make a new Apple ID out of it, nor replace the non-Apple ID which is the actual ID (except in the specific case of ex-MobileMe subscribers, where the address is the ID) so unless you can sign in on an iOS device with the @icloud.com address as well as the actual ID I'm not clear what you mean.

If you have neither an iCloud account nor an Apple ID and buy a new iOS device, then, during the initial setup of your new iOS device you can create an Apple ID and iCloud address at the same time with your iCloud address being your Apple ID.

Interesting - I'm surprised Apple allow this given the normal requirements when creating an ID separately. However anyone doing this should certainly associate a non-Apple address with the ID otherwise if they forget their password they won't be able to access a reset password which has been sent to them. And of course as you say it doesn't alter the case for people trying to change an existing ID.

To ensure that people don't loose access to their ID, Apple could just enforce giving a second, alternate email address to rescue the account in case of password loss. That is unrelated to the issue that you can't have your main email address as your Apple ID if you want to use iCloud as your prime email provider (unless you are a completely new Apple customer who just bought an iOS device). That is almost a paradox situation considering that Apple usually does everything to make their customers stay as much as possible within the Apple ecosystem.

There is actually a serious point to not using your iCloud address as your login. As you know, with MobileMe the address was the login: a number of people suffered from the fact that there are idiots around who get the idea that they own an email address when in fact they don't (how they can come to this conclusion I don't know) - this results in the idiot attempting to log into MobileMe using it, but as they don't know the password they got slung out. Once they had done this around three times the account was locked and the password reset: now the genuine owner had to enter a new password and alter all his devices to suit. Then it all happened again. Sounds bizarre, but it did happen to a number of people. And I suppose that a malicious person could keep locking you out of your account deliberately. Also, if the same login is being used for iTunes this could cause probems. I imagine the same problem could arise with iCloud.

Of course I don't know whether this issue has entered Apple's thinking, but it's worth bearing in mind.

Roger, there is no point of locking an account just because of three failed login attempts. There are plenty of less clumsy ways of securing an account against theft like enforcing sensible passwords, blocking only the IP address where the failed logins came from, gradually extend timeouts between failed login attempts, just to name a few.

Well, it's what MobileMe did, and I don't know about iCloud but it may be similar. It'a academic, anyway, because now the casual visitor doesn't know your login.

Roger, you're wrong on one point!

You can go and create an icloud address.

You wipe a ios device, then log in using your icloud address

The you take the option to create an Apple ID

At that point you can put in your pre-existing iCloud address as your new Apple ID, I've just done this on a friend's phone

apart from anything else, continuously asserting 'you can't do it' when it's patently ilogical for them not to be the same, nor having any idea why this prohibition is in place doesn't help the many thousands of people who also feel it is illogical.

Apple is a customer centric company, if there is a good reason tell us, if there isn't then change it