iCloud telling me email is taken. The email is my mobileme address. What gives?

The problem is not email, MobileMe. Or iCloud.

It is iTunes.

When Apple started iTunes Music Store before .Mac, MobileMe, and iCloud, all you needed was a unique Apple ID for iTunes only, with any linked email address. The latter of which was alterable, but for licesning reasons your Apple ID was not.

Then came the online .Mac and MobileMe, now iCloud services. And, most importantly, the App Store, which, for iOS devices, is managed through iTunes.

The online services always used an email name as the Apple ID. This forced all online customers plust ITMS customers to have two Apple ID's.

When iOS came out this created a sync problem, inlcuding for licensed content. iOS and now iCloud require ONLY an email Apple ID. But iTunes does not.

So people can still have two Apple ID's for iTunes (including apps...very important because they and the new music streaming are where iCloud and iTunes intersect), but only ONE functions for syncing with iCloud.

Which one?

The one with the email Apple ID.

To get around this Apple requires everyone to use a NON-Apple email to 'verify" your old Apple ID, the one without the email. And then you must manually authorize that account on all your devices. The failure to do one properly acorss all apps and any application on a Mac or Windows system will create either/or orphan/duplicate data. Worse, as people are finding out on Apple TV's, it will not allow for some iTunes purchases to show.

Because of this issue, Aplpe is not allowing:

1) Merging accounts. Apparently there are licensing and technical issues here. This would solve the problem outright as many have guessed astutely, but for some reason Apple is not prepared to go down this path.

2) Use of your .me or .mac email addresses to veify your original (non-email) Apple ID. This is causing by far the most problems as many people only use a single Apple-generated email. Worse, for many, their original Apple ID is inextricably linked to an ancient email account, no longer functioning, that pre-dates even .Mac, and goes to the originas of ITMS.

So the problem is with Apple because they force created two Apple ID's originally distinct (ITMS, then .Mac, MobileMe, iCloud), but are now forced to sync all of these ID's without allowing them to merge.

What to do? Keep complaining and taking up Genius tme and the phone and service chats. Email Tim Cook. Tell the media. Submit feedback. Dispute purchases.

It's a mess. It's Apple's mess. It needs fixing.

I had the same problem and beat my head against the wall until I decided to just go forward and delete my Apple ID (the one that was causing this problem) I deleted it using the screen that the iCloud presents when you hit the iCloud setting in system settings.

After i deleted my Apple Id using the iCloud Systems Settings", i realized that my Apple Id was not deleted everywhere, but only as far as iCloud was concerned. For example, ITunes still worked and I could sign in successfully to my Apple developer account - both of which used the same Apple Id that I had just "deleted" from the iCloud.

After this, I made sure that I had closed everyting as far a iCloud and Mobile Me was concered. Then I went thru the process again, this time creating a new Apple id (with the same email address as the "deleted" one). ICloud took it and that ended this issue.

I was on Lion when I did this. Cant say what would have happened on earlier OS X releases.

This iwas my experience.

I ran into the same issues that many are seeing: (a) I tried to add an alternate email address to my Apple ID account and got the message that the "Email address is already in use" or (b) Tried to set up FaceTime or iMessage and got an error, or (c) Tried to verify an email address and got an error.

The essential problem seems to be that whenever we used any Apple service in the past and gave an email address, it became a distinct Apple ID. If you used Mobile Me, FaceTime with an email address, Game Center, iTunes Store or signed up as a Developer, they became distinct accounts. I also suspect that if you purchased something at an Apple Store and gave them an email address and if it wasn't an existing Apple ID, it became one.

Now along comes iOS 5 with iCloud. Apple decided to create a master Apple ID database, but there was no previous concept of a Primary Account and secondary Sub-Accounts. So they ended up creating a flat database with many distinct Applie ID accounts, even though we users never saw them as such.

The work around to fixing this is to fall back to a single "master" Apple ID.

• Pick a primary Apple ID, ideally the one in which you make all your iTunes/App store purchases.
• For all other email addresses that you want to associate with this primary account go to https://appleid.apple.com. Assume all your email addresses are distinct Apple IDs and go through the process of resetting the password (if you didn't know it). Then when you finally have access, go in and change the Apple ID to a junk email address that you have no intention of usingand will not overlap with someone else's email address. The screen will now say that your Apple ID is not verified and a verification email has been sent to the new junk email address. Ignore this. You may need to use multiple junk addresses if you are resetting multiple email addresses.
• You can now go back to your primary Apple ID and add in the other email addresses as alternate email addresses.
• You will get a verification email at the alternate email address. Once you click on the "verify" link in the email, verify it with YOUR PRIMARY APPLE ID.
• Now go back to iMessage, iCloud and FaceTime on all of your iDevices. Remove the old email addresses you were using and sign in with your PRIMARY APPLE ID. Once you do so, you will get an option to add "alternate email addresses" where you can be reached (for iMessage and FaceTime). Enter one of your alternate email addresses and they should get added without any need for verification.

The above does not solve the issue of having multiple primary iTunes account IDs, say when you and your spouse and kids purchased stuff with different iTunes IDs. Each of the IDs has important information associated with it, so you can't just throw it away by pointing it to a junk address. If you do so, you won't be able to use that protected content associated with that account. There is no workaround for it.

There is also no way to share information across Apple IDs. Let's say I want to share a "family" calendar with my spouse or family, but not all my work calendars. There is no way to do it. If we use one Apple ID, they get everything. If you use separate Apple IDs, they get nothing. Same thing with photo stream. My photo stream is available on all my iDevices if they sign in using the same primary Apple ID. I may want my photo stream to be sync'd between my iPhone and Mac, but not the iPad that is shared by everyone in the family. There's no way to do it. And the problem is only multiplied when there are multiple 'i' devices in the family, with each person wanting to share some identifiers (purchases) but not all.

Bottomline, Apple has made a complete iMess of the Apple ID situation. This really needs to be fixed now, in one possibly painful swoop, before iCloud takes off.

i have the same problem. my icloud works, i can see my contacts but when i want to enable email it says enter an email and then it says its already used pick another one. but its my mobileme email. and when i try to move from mobileme it says your account is expired, which is true. but so what ? just because my account is expired how should that make me any less able to use my email ? this is ********. APPLE FIX THIS !

UPDATE: icloud works, and i lost all my contacts. basically Lion told me all software was up to date and no restart needed but i decided to make double sure and restarted. having already deleted my .gmail iCloud account i was able to login with my .me apple id ... so far so good. i then went on the iPhone 4S and decided to repeat the same steps on the phone - deleted my .gmail iCloud account and signed in using .me account. i was on top of the world 🙂 until i realized i lost ALL my contacts. iCloud deleted them all when i deleted the .gmail apple id based iCloud account. Brilliant apple ! just brilliant ! So in order to use your .me address with iCloud you have to wipe all my contacts - just great ! Now to be sure the software warned me it was going to wipe all my contacts but for some reason i thought it would only wipe them from iCloud BUT NO - it wiped them FOR GOOD. It's a good thing i at least remember my mother's phone number ...

this is wrong. very very wrong.

Same problem here. I am so ticked off about this mess and the hours and hours I have had to spend trying to fix it that I think I will just delete everything except my itunes account and stay with my old MSN address. I have a nice MacBook Pro, a Mac desktop, a new iPad 2, and the new iPhone 4S, so Apple has already made their money off me. I hated MS because of these kinds of problems, and Apple is getting to be just as bad. And as I write this a commercial come up touting the new iCloud and how amazing it is.

It s JUNK. Stay away from it until Apple decides to spend some of their billions fixing THEIR problem, which has become MY problem. My address book is a mess, all my phone contacts are gone from my fancy new iPhone, and I am thankful I didn't have iCalendar or any of that garbage.

Finally the answer I needed! Thank you for the note on changing the sub-email to a junk email. That worked, so now my kids have iMessage up and working with their own email id. And thanks for the notes about photostream and all of that. It all makes sense - that it is all a mess.

Thanks!