Some aspect of iCloud sync is messing with Mail. My wife will be composing an email on her iMac and, seemingly without provocation, it disappears from her mac and shows up on my MBP. As you might suspect, this makes her unhappy. This seems only to happen if I’m using mail on the second mac.
Even if I have to give up some nice feature of iCloud, I’d like to stop this behavior.
Thanks
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Jerry
That's part of the continuity function of iCloud on your Apple devices. The idea is that when you start writing an email on one device you can put that down, pick up another, and then continue writing.
It sounds like perhaps your wife's iMac and your MacBook Pro are both using the same Apple ID. So according to iCloud, you are both one person. To fix this, you should both have your own Apple IDs.
There are many reasons why people have the same Apple ID as their spouse, but most of those went away with the introduction of Family Sharing. You just set it up so one Apple ID is the main one and the other a family member. Now you can share purchases and the like. https://www.apple.com/family-sharing/
Thanks Gary. I gather from your answer that there's no way to turn off just the Continuity Feature in iCloud. Can you give me some tips on the best way to separate "her" content from the current single account and migrated it to a new account? Will I have "permissions" issues?
As always, thanks for your great advice.
Jerry
Jerry: it is going to be tough, but mostly for the one that is getting the new account. The existing account you use as the main account for the family, so the person who ends up with that one will have everything the same. How tough it will be depends on what you have shared -- like if you are sharing the same Documents folder in iCloud Drive, Photos library, etc. There is a lot to deal with, but you'll just have to deal with it as it comes depending on your exact situation.
Maybe a good way to handle it is to create a new user account (Mac user account, not Apple ID) on the iMac, then set that user account up with the new Apple ID and make it a family member. Then she just uses that new Mac account and can fall back to the old Mac account as she deals with things.
System preferences - General - uncheck "Allow hand-off between this Mac and your iCloud devices".
Do this on both your wife's and your macs - it worked a treat for us!! I haven't yet investigated family sharing and whether this interferes with the stopping of hand-off.
Nicholas: That is a band-aid. What you really need is to get to one Apple ID = one person. Sharing Apple IDs is a bad idea and leads to problems. Family Sharing lets you each have your own Apple ID and still share purchases.