Change my "Apple ID and Primary Email Address" to my @me.com address

WC, I am a little annoyed at your attitude. Please stop it. No one is mentioning "disabling" anything. Not directly anyway but indirectly, by merging Apple IDs. As others have written, I am stuck too with an unwanted Apple ID of yore that happens to be a text string = @hotmail.com which I no longer use as my email because I've banished hotmail from my life. I need Apple to allow me to reassign my Apple ID text string to equal my primary @me.com email address text string, horizontally and vertically through the ecosystem. That's all. If English is getting in the way of understanding, we can try another language of your choice.

I don't think WC has a bad attitude, nor does he have a language problem, nor is he doing anything he should stop. He's asking a smart question. IF your ONE and ONLY email address is me.com, and it suddenly DOESN'T WORK and/or ISN'T RECOGNIZED due to some unexpected malfunction caused by an Apple system overhaul (it happened to thousands of MobileMe users when iCloud was launched), HOW is Apple to get in touch with you? It seems to me that one should be able to choose to use a phone number, mailing address or non-Apple email address as an ALTERNATIVE in the event of a(nother) system failure, but use a me.com address as an Apple ID and PRIMARY email address.

Why in the world does Apple want to FORCE people to use ANOTHER COMPANY'S services just to have an Apple ID? I'm desperately trying to get rid of an old AOL address that I used for my Apple ID many years ago, but Apple is forcing me to use that or a gmail account that could easily get deleted due to inactivity. Receipts and other Apple communications very inconveniently go to that otherwise unused account. Apple's increasing inability to make software updates, basic tasks and account maintenance hassle-free is starting to make AOL look more reasonable.

In the interest of symplifying my digital/virtual life, I have chosen to retain and manage one and only one personal email address, which is my @me.com. In my Apple account, this @me.com is both my Primary and Alternate email. And that's that; that's what it shall be. As far as Apple needing to contact me, I can't imagine they needing to. But in the event of an email server shutdown I can presumably receive my emails from Apple after the outage gets resolved. Right? So I am not the least worried. All in all, all I need is for my Apple ID text string to equal my @me.com Primary email address text string. Apple needs to allow us to merge IDs. As I wrote earlier, my Apple ID is currently @hotmail.com, an email account that was closed down/deactivated by me several months ago and gladly so. And since @hotmail.com is not listed as either Primary or Alternate email in my Apple account, all is well. I am in agreement with you about everything else you wrote.

I've just been into an apple store to ask about this...

I too originally signed up to Apple with old gmail address. I have been maintaining it because I thought I had to.

What I found out tonight is that the Apple ID is JUST A NAME.

You can go into 'Manage Apple ID' and change your primary email address to your @me and you can also delete the secondary gmail address. Leaving just one email address - the @me one.

I found out I actually have two Apple IDs but they are linked. If I type in my @me address as my apple ID it signs into the same account. The only legacy is that on my devices it lists my old gmail email address as my ID - no big deal I reckon!

Another vote form me. Rediculously irritating. I have to keep my gmail account for one thing only… in case I need to manage my iTunes/App Store account. Enfuriating!

Hi I am joining the chorus 😉

I have my ID and primary mail with Yahoo. I have some issue with them so I would like to change, at least with another email, possibly me but otherwise another one !

If I go to AppleID and edit my primary mail, there is no way to confirm the modifications..... weird

This means that if I switch off yahoo, I cannot receive any other maul from apple anymore since the primary mail is still that but doesn't exist anymore...

Does this mean that if I set up a new account with a .me mail address I can merge it with my, current, gmail account?

From what others have said this seems to be a bit 'too' simple 😟

I have to admit htat I'm with others on this - I've moved across many email addresses over the years and I've never been 'forced' to use an out of date mail address before.

All seems very odd, especially for Apple to effectively 'block' their own iCloud email service!

I'm also in the same situation. I have changed all my accounts to use my new @me.com address as i aim to just use this email address for everything from now on. However, the only site/account i have had issues with is APPLE!

It will not let me change the primary email address to my @me.com one as i get the following message:

'You cannot create an Apple ID using a MobileMe account. If this is your email address, it is also your Apple ID.'

It will let me use it as an alternate email address and i can sign in to appleID with this alternate email address but at the moment there is no way of deleting my primary email address or changing it to my @me.com one.

Please sort this out apple. I, along with many others, have agreed to use your @me email address so why not let me for my appleid and let me get rid of my old address????

I find it annoying too. The most annoying thing is that icloud calendar invites get sent to contacts with the return email address being your primary apple ID, which is an email address I no longer use. If people reply to my icloud calendar invite, their message goes to an old, defunct email address. There is no way I can change this to make it my @me.com email address, even though it is coming from the icloud calendar!

This really needs to be fixed by apple.

I think I have the same problem. I set up my Apple ID originally with iTunes on my Windows computer. It was my @gmail.com email address. Now I have a Macbook with iCloud, and with that a new @me.com email address. I want desperately to have my new @me.com address to be my Apple ID but it won't let me, as you've said.

Ok, so this whole issue that I suffer through with y'all has been in the back of my mind for months.

Say Apple woos you and you finally decide to dump Gmail (or whoever else you're stuck with). That's fine and all, but Apple forces you to keep in touch with your former lover. Talk about baggage. Why? Who knows what reasons Apple may try to offer and what the underlying cause really is. You're just stuck in a dysfunctional relationship, with no way of letting go of the past.

But then it hit me.

Everybody has a mobile phone number. That means that everybody also has an mobile email address for SMS messages. I have T-Mobile, which means I can email myself a text message at

[my 10-digit number]@tmomail.net.

Here are the main ones:

So rather than string along an old flame, I can instead make use of a number that's always been there for me, just in case. It's you, just... a part of you that you've never needed to know.

Point is, I successfully switched my apple ID to this email address. So while I am, for now, forever destined to have two different email addresses associated with my Apple ID, this one is at least a currently used account. That, and if some crazy crazy stuff goes down and Apple needs to contact me like many people think, Apple has a hotline straight to my phone.

Meanwhile, I can at least use my @me address to login wherever I want, and just turn a blind eye if I happen to see that phone number address appear. Kinda like those four extra zip code digits that nobody uses—they're there, they exist, but I have absolutely no use for them. Hey, at least it's not some stupid email address you thought was clever but was really just an embarrassment.

Here's a complete list of those SMS gateway addresses if you have some other podunk provider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

In my opinion it is even more outraging to see a 10 digit, seemingly random, number followed by @vtext.com as my primary ID. That everytime I have to download something on my iPhone App store that I get a string of numbers instead of a slick clean looking @me.com eMail address. This is no way a fix, just a side step in our issue.

I sure didn't claim it was a full-on fix. But many of the complaints were about an Apple ID that matched an unused email address, such as matthewfromelizabeth baywhose calendar invite responses went to an unused email address. Fact is, there is no workaround to the requirement of having a non @me.com email address for an Apple ID. So I tried to find the next best thing—an email that, while not necessarily used by me, was not old, defunct, or otherwise inaccessible.

Also, why does your own phone number seem random to you, especially if you're seeing it on your phone? If your biggest gripe is that your password prompt isn't slick enough, you don't have it that bad.

I simply would like to switch the email accounts. Make the @me.com my primary and my GMail account my secondary. Kind of how my old verizon account (ISP) was secondary to my gmail account and that just eventually went to the waste side. To be honest I do not care if Gmail is titled as the "primary email" to apple, I just want everything I do to be sent to my @me.com without fussing with forwarding my gmail mail to my @me.com address.

I wonder if this is a sign of hope: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/16/apple-rolling-out-icloud-com-email-addresses -with-ios-6-beta-3/

Apple will apparently be rolling out @icloud.com email addresses when iOS 6 launches. If you're new to iCloud, you get an @icloud.com. If you already have @me.com or @mac.com, you'll get a matching @iCloud.com address.

So none of us have been able to set our @me.com as our primary email address, because it says you can't use a MobileMe account as a primary email. So maybe we'll be able to use the @iCloud version as the primary email? But then I'm sure there are plenty of people (myself included) that prefer the brevity of "me" to "icloud", so... I dunno.

Or maybe having @mac, @me, and @icloud versions will just muck everything up further, and we're all screwed!