Is this a phishing email?

You are wise always to be suspicious. However, everything seems to check out with this email. I'm also in Australia and I received a copy of this today - I noted the Sydney contact details at the end of the email's text you included above.

(i) it links to "https://account.apple.com/sign-in" not "support.apple.com"

The account URL is quoted in Apple's support page Identify legitimate emails from the App Store or iTunes Store. The "/sign-in" part is added when you click on the blue Sign In button at that page.

(ii) Apple doesn't generally ask its customers to click an email link

And I don't click on them either, but most of the emails I receive from Apple carry some links. I just looked at my iCloud invoices and they also carry links. One of them is to Apple Account in the App Store, for example.

The link to "Learn More" besides the Verified Logo label in the email throws up a message box with its own "Learn More" link which takes you to Apple's page About BIMI support in Apple Mail. This discusses digitally verified logos and that Apple's Mail supports BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification).

(iii) the copyright notice refers to "Apple Pty Ltd" not "Apple Inc."

This is Apple's Australian subsidiary. See the ACCC webpage here, which says:

"Apple Pty Ltd is a subsidiary of Apple Inc. and carries on business in Australia as an importer, distributor and supplier to consumers of Apple-branded computer equipment, portable media players, mobile phones, tablets and accessories."

I personally believe that it is a phishing message as it has no solid signs that it is genuine.

If it is genuine, it demonstrates the incompetency of some Apple employees that are responsible for communications with customers and complete absence of QA for content used in such global communications.

In this case I would expect Apple to send apologies with corrected content and proper proof that message is genuine to all the customers who received this communication, as otherwise its impact is opposite to the original intent and indicates that we can't trust Apple communications anymore...

Apple customers shouldn't need to guess and verify, are the communications genuine or not.

There are good content management practices for this purpose that must be adopted by such a huge company.

Just received this 10 mins ago, can’t really find much on it ! And am hoping this is just a safety check for everyone. I’ve been having issues with all my emails/accounts being hacked these past months. so I’m not sure if someone is trying to get into it again or if this is for everybody

i received this morning in US, but only on 1 of my accounts, not the other.

It would help if you would identify your country. So far I have only seen Australians post about this. In that case it would strongly suggest it is an Apple generated email because a spammer would not have that kind of detail about email addresses on a list.

This Community is set up as an end-user to end-user technical issue support service (i.e., users like you helping other users). I am sorry you are dissatisfied. Unfortunately the people who can reply your post are just users like yourself who cannot do anything about this. We are not Apple, which does not provide support on this forum. Feedback for Apple will likely get more attention if you send it using: Product Feedback - Apple

They seem to be rolling out over time. I got one email yesterday and one this morning.

I'm based in the UK, postings from other members of the forum indicate that this communication was global.

I appreciate that this forum doesn't belong to Apple, but I would expect that Apple monitors its content gathering the feedback on their products and services.

I do expect this analysis from such a reputable company that normally delivers benchmark quality.

The page for product feedback that you refer to has no topics related to the problem that is a subject of this thread.

I received it this morning in the USA as well. My Yahoo email had a checkmark by the sender name (appleaccount@inside.apple.com), I guess indicating it was a legitimate email. The body of the email had no misspellings, proper grammar, etc. so that part is good.

I have taken no action in response to it.

This is almost certainly a phishing ploy. Delete the email and log onto apple.com and look for the same features if you are interested.

you cannot tell if a link is genuine by seeing if it corresponds to similar links for apple.

I got this and sent it to reportphishing@apple.com. Maybe they'll respond.