How Do I Change My iCloud Email Address?

Comments: One Response to “How Do I Change My iCloud Email Address?”

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

That would be a completely different email address. To email systems, the email address abcd1@ and abcd2@ are completely different, even if they look similar to us.

So what you want to do is to completely change your iCloud email address. This is tricky, but it should be doable if you carefully do it in stages. Be very cautious the whole way because doing something wrong could leave you without access to your Apple ID and iCloud account.

First, you'd need to create a new alias for your iCloud email address. This is pretty straight-forward. Here is how to do it: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-and-manage-email-aliases-mm6b1a490a/icloud

Now you can tell people to email you at the alias you set up. Messages will arrive in your inbox just like they sent something to your main email address. But you will also have to go into your Mail app preferences, Composing and change your "Send new messages from" to the new alias. Also in Accounts, choose the account, and then Email Address. You should also change your contact in the Contacts app.

Or, you can just set up this alias and use it here and there when it seems appropriate. But leave your real main email address alone. That would be a good way to go: just create an alias to use and not mess with the tricky parts.

To really switch your Apple ID so the main one is this new email address, you have to carefully follow this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202667

There are probably more things you need to pay attention to as you go along. This is a very tricky process. Not meant to be easy. And I can't give you all of the steps as to do that I'd need to go through the process myself (which I have no reason to do). So my advice is to only do this if it is absolutely necessary.