Strange email about my Apple ID from Apple

TidBITS Talk
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This is timely for me, because 2 days ago I received a strange email from Apple, which said in part:

Your Apple ID information has been updated. The following changes to your Apple ID, douglerner, were made on June 13, 2024 at 6:05:14 PM GMT+8:
Apple ID
Email address(es)

There’s no confidential info there (you all know I am Doug Lerner), but it struck me as strange for multiple reasons:

  1. I did not make any account changes.
  2. I thought it was not possible to change your Apple ID. Maybe it is.
  3. The strangest was that it said my Apple ID was douglerner. I had always assumed that Apple IDs were email addresses.

Of course I suspected phishing, but the email was from Apple, and the link to go to for changing my Apple ID password was a legitimate link.

I contacted Apple Support and they looked at it with me via screensharing and didn’t see anything “phishing-ish” but just in case helped me file a report.

I logged into my account via the web, and since I hadn’t changed my Apple ID/Account password in 7 years I changed it, logging out all my devices. I logged in again on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad and everything was syncing fine.

Afterwards though, there were two technical oddities:

  1. Even though syncing was fine between all devices, copy/paste to and from my MBP was not working. After talking to Support again finally I just restarted the Mac and that was working again.

  2. After changing my password and logging out of devices, the next time I put on my Watch it asked me for my Apple ID password. I never saw that before on the Watch. I tried to enter it, but with numbers and upper case and lowercase letters (consider O, 0, o) it was impossible to sketch in on the Watch. Why do they even have that prompt there? It seems to be working fine though, and I get notices, etc.

Anybody else see a warning email from Apple like that?

Apple Support did tell me that while most of the time Apple IDs are email addresses, sometimes they are phone numbers. I never new that.

At a prompt though, they shouldn’t say enter your Apple Account. They could say enter your Apple Account ID which might be your email address.

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It is if the Apple ID is an email address that’s not mobile me, dotmac, or iCloud. I did change mine from a gmail email address to another domain a couple of years ago.

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Originally you could create an Apple ID that was neither an email address nor a phone number. I still have my original Apple ID (or at least I still have a record of the login credentials; I haven’t tried to use it in ages), but later I created a new Apple ID that was my original Apple ID but with “@mac.com” tacked on to the end.

If memory serves, I created that new one out of confusion while setting up new device, not realizing that it was different from the original. For a couple of years I was using both Apple IDs, the older one on an older Mac and the newer one on everything else, and I was occasionally baffled by the differences between the two accounts until I figured out what I had done.

I can’t tell from your description if part of the issue is that, like me, you have two Apple IDs and don’t realize it, but it might be worth checking.

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Currently if you go to appleid.apple.com the login says Apple ID - Email or Phone Number.

I just tried logging in with that plain douglerner but it didn’t work.

Also, the notification I mentioned was emailed to my actual Apple ID correct email address.

I still suspect a blip on the part of Apple’s notification system, but they haven’t gotten back with me to confirm.

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Got it. Still, I thought it was worth a shot to mention it.

And just for kicks, I just tried to log in with that original Apple ID at iCloud.com. The name I used was recognized as an Apple ID, but the login process then sent me to a screen where I learned that I had to rename the ID to an email address before I could proceed. Instead I backed out and didn’t bother with it.

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Way back when, the username could be just a username, not an email address (my first iTools/Dot Mac username was inherited from eWorld, I think.) At some point, Apple stopped allowing that and we all had to change to an email address, any email address. In addition, if you later set up an Apple email account, that could also be used as your login for Apple services. I tried this at one point, and could log into my AppleID account using a prior non-Apple email address, my mac.com address, my (never used) me.com address, and ditto iCloud address.

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I went through that sequence (xxx, xxx@mac.com, xxx@me.com and xxx.icloud.com) and it was relatively seamless for my AppleID. However I did have problems with my App Store and iTunes accounts, even though they used the same user name. I ended up repurchasing some apps that were bought with xxx, if they were still available.