Create and setup me.com email

You cannot create an @me.com address. Apple’s MobileMe service was killed off in 2012. Anyone with a working @me.com or @mac.com now is using that as nothing more than an alias to the @icloud.com account they must have created prior to the MobileMe shutdown in 2012. Anyone who did not do that prior to 2012 lost their @mac.com and @me.com email addresses for good. The only email addresses offered to new users by Apple since 2012 are @icloud.com addresses.

If you have an @me.com address that works, logging into your AppleID (https://appleid.apple.com) will show it as a “reachable at” address in the upper right panel (and clicking edit there, and then the (i) icon next to the @me.com address will popup a message telling you this is now an alias for your AppleID). You can edit your AppleID to use an alias as the primary address though, if you wish to.

If you have an AppleID (which you do if you are on these forums), you already have an Apple email address. Go here: https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage, login with the same credentials you used to get to the forums and you should see what the other email addresses you already with Apple are.

P.S. this is Apple’s support doc to explain those legacy email addresses and their association with icloud, as well as the dates

iCloud: About your @icloud.com, @me.com, and @mac.com email addresses - Apple Support

What actually is a bit confusing to me is it says you cannot login to your AppleID using an alias. And I did just try with my @me.com address and it did not work. But I could swear I have been able to do that at one point sometime in the past (i.e. sometime from 2011 to now). So while I can use my primary third party email and my @icloud.com email, the @me.com email doesn’t work as an AppleID login (and maybe I am just having a senior moment, but I swear I have used it in the past ~9 years or so to do so?).

Thank you Michael. Your discussion helped me a lot. I have both of the aliases you mentioned and never really had the full story of their existence although I have used me.com for years now (and mac.com before). So, in a sense me.com. is primary for me although I never made it primacy "official." What is the significance of making an alias primary?

Honestly, I don’t see any huge point to making an alias a primary, but it came up with another users recent posts wanting to get rid of their third party gmail account, use icloud as their primary address and get some other third party email as their secondary backup email address.

I made my iCloud account back in 2011 when iCloud went live (and so my @me.com instantly became an alias to that icloud inbox) and I remember I could not make it or my @me.com primary then. But the current “change appleid” document does say one can move an alias up to formally be the primary listed email address if one wishes to.

Since for my AppleID (which uses my own personal email on one of my owned domains as primary), I can sign in with my primary (third party) email, my iCloud email or my me.com email, it really doesn’t matter to me which is actually primary, an alias or a backup (I use a gmail account as backup) since any of the first three (other than the backup) work fine to access my one single AppleID.

But depending on what changes one is trying to make, thanks to the discussion with that recent poster, I do get why one might one to use an alias as primary as they make changes. I would also suggest people keep some wholly independent email account as a backup too.

In your case your primary email, your icloud email and either of the me.com or mac.com email will all work just fine as is to login to that one single AppleID. So it is sort of moot, except for that rare instance where you’re trying to get rid of a third party primary and shift emails around.

Thank you Michael. On mac.com, I go back to way before me.com was related to sharing photos, etc., with all others, and we even had Apple hosted websites back then. Lots of work went into these, and I was disappointed when Apple pulled the rug out from under us.

I'll get back to you. What I was going to say needs more work. Sorry!

donv (The Ghost) wrote:

I'll get back to you. What I was going to say needs more work. Sorry!

AppleID is often NOT a me.com or i loud. com address (in fact it typically isn’t).

Right. Good post above. That's what I was trying to get at, but I iclouded my own mind. 🙃

😂

I just logged into the Apple Store (Apple.com) and here again using mac.com.