I appeal once again to the munificence of the premier Apple-centric brains trust, in search of knowledge and wisdom, to solve a tricky little problem.
A bloke I know—we’ll call him Pete—is in a tight spot. He’s created an iCloud email address that he is using primarily for mailing list traffic. He has recently discovered (thanks to me, as it happens) that he can edit his server-side mail rules in the iOS Settings app (iOS 17+) but, alas, it transpires only for the primary iCloud user on the device. (Settings, your profile, iCloud, iCloud Mail, iCloud Mail Rules …) If an iCloud account is a secondary account, then even though it supports the basic mail/contacts/calendars services, strangely, it does not offer the interface for configuring mail rules (or, indeed, much of anything beyond toggles for the services).
But Pete wants to use that interface. He jumps on and off many lists and the web UI is just too much of a stretch, even in mobile Safari. I have been thinking about how we solve this problem, and it seems to me that a safe bet would be to simply forward his lists account to his real, primary account, from which he could then use this UI to filter mail. However, he’d still have to sign in in order to send mail from his lists address, and I wonder if, by use of aliases, we could circumvent even the need for the secondary account. The other approach—of swapping the accounts used—is off the table, because his primary account is where all the action is and losing it just for this would be unacceptable.
So the question is this: if we could somehow rename his secondary lists account to something unused, then create an alias on his primary account to reclaim that address, would it then be possible for him to live the one-account-for-everything dream that Apple intends for him? It would all rather depend on whether Apple would let him take a former iCloud address, that he owns, as an alias for another iCloud account, that he also owns. I’ve done lots and lots of Googling, and ChatGPT 4O says it’s impossible, but I’ve not seen anyone discussing this; if anything, all I see is the reverse, that of people wishing to turn an alias into an account, which is not what we want here (and is, incidentally, still forbidden by Apple). The caveats Apple has for reusing email addresses frankly melt my brain, so I would not be at all surprised to learn that this plan won’t work. But the forwarding approach would seem to have a high certainty of working, so that will be the backup plan if doing this little manoeuvre isn’t possible.
Any help/experience/advice greatly appreciated!
