Disappearing email address in iCloud+ Custom Domains

TidBITS Talk
1

So I use iCloud+. I have a custom domain. Let’s say I am me@mydomain.it

I do Family Sharing with my wife. She has had a custom email address on that domain for about 9 months. Let’s say it’s wife@mydomain.it it is linked to her icloud wife@icloud.com

All has been functioning perfectly. Suddenly, my wife’s email address ceased to function. All emails to her bounce. Email to wife@icloud.com still works. I’ve tried just about everything. Removing her from my custom domain and re-adding her doesn’t work because it tries to send an invitation to join the domain by emailing wife@mydomain.it

Her iphone gets an occasional notification saying that she is no longer in mydomain.it

On her phone it says she is still in the domain but when I click on that entry it says “Something went wrong”

I’ve been liaising with a senior apple engineer who has taken screen recordings and logs from both Macs and iPhones and so far nothing. I surmise that there is a corruption or a lock somewhere in the backend servers and there needs to be a “flush”.

A thought: what if I took the nuclear option and completely deleted mydomain.it email set up with iCloud+. Presumably this would flush all remnants of the domain from Apple’s backend servers. I could then recreate the custom email domain and add myself and my wife. Existing email would not be deleted as they are on the iCloud email servers.

Has anyone seen this? Solution? What do you think of my proposal?

2

Have you set up, and administer, the custom domain? That is, do you pay a website/domain provider for the domain?

In my case I have to log onto my account with that provider and manage the email services (as well as remember to pay the annual fee).

3

Certainly. It’s been fine for many months. My email address works. Hers suddenly stopped.

4

Have you, from her phone, deleted the email account and then reset it up? I may be just Mail on her iPhone.

5

Yes, I’ve tried that too, to no avail.