I’m being asked for help and as I can’t, I’m passing on the request.
An Instagram account has a linked email address set as name@mac.com. The friend needs to enter a code being sent to that address, but it seems that it doesn’t exist: emails bounce.
name@icloud.com exists, and receives emails. I’d assumed the two were essentially the same (my own email is @mac.com). The mac.com address hasn’t been used for many years, if it’s been used at all.
@mac.com aliases are not guaranteed to work. It depends on a number of conditions relating to when your friend set up their account, and what they’ve done with it since. Full details here:
I do wish more sites would verify email addresses before allowing their use. If Instagram had made sure the email address was working before requiring a code, your friend wouldn’t be stuck in this situation.
I have a @mac.com email from the early days but when they starting charging for MobileME, I let it lapse and stopped using it for email (but still kept it as my AppleID address).
Once iCloud came around, I looked if I could revive it but no dice. However, in just the last couple of months I’ve noticed emails coming into my @icloud.com account that are addressed to my @mac.com address. I did a test email and found that it’s now working as an alias to my @icloud.com account.
It might be worth checking your friend’s iCloud account to see if there’s some way of turning on the alias feature for the @mac.com address. (Or reach out to Apple support and see if they can help - even though I’m well out of warranty/AppleCare, Apple techs went above and beyond to see if they could diagnose an issue I was having with Apple Mail.)
I have gone through the sequence of emails: @mac, @me and @iCloud. I can still receive all 3 but can now only send email with the icloud address.
At least they still work. The trickiest thing over the years has been when I changed ISP and my previous email account was suddenly cut off. I had to change numerous logins. I suppose the tip from this experience is to use an email account like icloud or gmail that is not tied to an ISP - but that has its own issues.
I don’t whether my experience in Germany is one that suits every possible situation. My wife and me have since “eternal” times both all three addresses. All three are used on a daily basis and are working fine. All of them are able to receive and send emails.
My wife has an extremely short email-address with only three letters – two of them vocals. She gets quite regularly – let’s say once a week – email that is not intended to be delivered to her but to people with longer email-addresses. This happens more often to the mac.com address. I have also the impression – not scientifically based – that she gets more spam to the mac-address. She now uses the .me–address as her regular one.
I – with a fiver letter-address – don’t have any problems with any of the addresses. All of our alias-addresses work fine, but are seldom used, since we have an own domain, that we use to build short time addresses (i.e. spam, bad_spam etc.) for mail to corporations (sorry – mostly American) that tend to ignore signoff-messages.
I had, for a while, an email address which I initially thought was great - tommy at ireland dot com. Couldn’t believe I got it, promptly started using it for my personal email.
Turned out to be a royal pain in the proverbials. The amount of junk that came my way, people used it for filling in dummy emails on websites, a lot confirm your registration emails from pr0n sites. Ended up dropping it.
Geoff Duncan got geoff at mac.com when Apple first opened registration and has long regretted it.
It’s one reason I always use my full name as my username, since it’s unusual. There is one other fairly well-known Adam Engst, but as far as I know, we have little overlap and thus little email confusion. (He sounds like a great guy; he’s performed with a KISS tribute band, danced with the Rockettes, won money on two TV game shows, and is now a lawyer in Seattle. We’ve corresponded a few times.)
There is another issue with these multiples but linked domain names: Which one is the correct one for Apple ID. As most here, I have an original mac.com email address and subsequently its later iterations. I always used the email address ending in mac.com for any AppleID related process: signing in devices, iTunes/App stores and the AppleID website. A few months ago I noticed that whenever I tried to sign in to the website, it did not recognised my password. As I had other pressing tasks, I didn’t look what was happening, as everything else was fine. I keep receiving emails, the devices worked fine after updates. I even upgraded my main MBP to Big Sur without a problem.
A couple of days ago I remembered the issue. I checked and the web site rejected my password again.
After verifying the password four times against my digital and physical records, I used the email ending in iCloud.com and voila, the password worked!!!
I reckon the issue arose as I changed the country for the AppleID account last year and now the system treats iCloud.com as the main AppleID, not mac.com
As “Jeremy Roussak”, Adam, I see your rarity and raise you! Like Tigger, although no doubt less wonderful, I’m the only one. My problem is that even fewer people can spell Roussak (Rusak? Russack? Even Ruzaq, once) than can spell Engst - and even Jeremy causes some problems. At work, I avoid the standard and use all my initials. I got my own @mac.com address just after it was announced and have stuck with it ever since. I don’t find spam much of an issue. YMMV, I suppose.
I’ve had my @mac.com address since the beginning and it still delivers messages. My issue now is that Mail keeps trying to use @me.com when replying to messages arriving with the @mac.com addressing.
So, if your friend does in fact date back far enough to have an @mac.com address, those messages should still arrive.
I see Jolin has referenced the requisite Apple Support article.
However, you might want to see if contacting Apple Support can help with a workaround of some sort…I suspect you will be more likely to get help there than Instagram, though I would think that Instagram might have a procedure for an email snafu such as this.
I started with me.com decades ago, but I use mac.com routinely. I have been unable to reproduce this substitution of me.com for mac.com.
You did not say if you were using Mail on iOS or macOS. In either or both, sort through preferences which mention these addresses and make certain mac.com is set as the preferred sending address.
Yeah, I have both me.com and icloud.com (I got the former by signing up for Find iPhone when it became free during the Mobile Me days–remember that?). The situation is all a bit messed up, but on iOS you can go to Settings > (your name) > iCloud > Mail (at bottom) and there you see every possible address you can receive mail at; set the toggles to preference. Go to icloud.com and use the Mail app to edit the non-primary local-part aliases themselves. The toggles you set also control the addresses Apple thinks you are reachable at, which do appear to impact iMessage and FaceTime (you can see those at appleid.apple.com) and the permissible addresses that appear in Mail.app on Mac. No, I really don’t understand it either.
But iCloud Mail is a Hotel California, anyway. Once enabled, your iCloud address becomes an Apple ID in addition to any non-iCloud address you began with; if you should ever make the supreme mistake of changing your Apple ID to match your iCloud address, then you’re properly locked in to using it exclusively, forever after. Because you can’t disable iCloud Mail once enabled, and because Apple sends all important email to your Apple ID, the only way out is to forward your mail to another account (which may or may not actually be desirable). As far as I can see, deleting all your aliases and then changing the local-part of your Apple address (which, fortunately, is still apparently possible) to something completely unique and otherwise unknown is probably the best you can do. It’s also probably the correct solution, since iCloud Mail counts towards your storage space and you would wish to see it cleared out and stop receiving further mail if you wanted to get your storage back. All of which is by way of saying that I too intend to go back to my own domain and self-hosted email, and this is what I’ve learned in the process.
Clients who have transitioned to iPhones, about iPhone 4 time, require retraining regarding device “ownership” as construed by AppleID, especially as applies to FindMy and Notes and various messaging which present ongoing challenges as they mutate. And the different paradigms for synchronization for each of several Apple applications* exacerbates the problem. It no less confusing for the instructor as for the student.
*Outstanding examples include Mail, Messages, Contacts, Notes, and Find My . I don’t touch iCloud Drive or Keychain. My clients would be unsupportable, especially when they often call Apple Support first and then call me for a solution. And I refuse to use configuration kluges to make up for hardware and software deficiencies, especially in storage management and storage capacity.
I suspect the .mac address never in fact existed, and at the time of registration Instagram didn’t check, or require verification. I believe she’s solved the problem via Instagram. Thanks for all the suggestions.
