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Apple locked me out and says that's it?
- Thread starter Henk van Ess
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But that is the crux of the problem: adding the e-mail on M1 isn't possible because the mail account is now considered to be an iCloud account...
I didn't do the math here, lol., 12 years ago is NOT 1990
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Incorrect. MobileMe was introduced in June 2008.
Apple Introduces MobileMe Internet Service
www.apple.com
I have ****@me.com for ages and never used it as iCloud ID, but just for mail. The mail runs fine on my iPads and Macs. When I added the "internet account" to the new M1, I was not allowed to do that anymore and got a message that my account was locked. That mail address was not tied to purchases of any Apple hardware by me. But Cloud or @me email addresses are the same thing as Apple ID, even if you don’t ever make a purchase with said email accounts.
In this thread, somebody told me that the only way to settle this is via a legal procedure against Apple. (Wow, do you remember that San Bernardino case...) That would mean going in court and showing that I am the rightfulowner user just by allowing Apple to look at all my devices that access my mail via ***@me.com. I do not seek a conflict nor I want to make ***@me.com an iCloud account as Apple did.
Apple told me to use the normal support channels. Did that 3x, an endless loop. So that route won't work. I need an e-mail/contact of Apple in NL whom my lawyer can talk to, so we can start a procedure. I hate that, but I am running out of options. My endgame: ensure that I can keep using ***@me.com as my e-mail address, nothing else, I don't want to unlock devices with it, I don't want to make purchases, just receive my mail till Apple comes with Quantum 1 that will make e-mail obsolete
In this thread, somebody told me that the only way to settle this is via a legal procedure against Apple. (Wow, do you remember that San Bernardino case...) That would mean going in court and showing that I am the rightful
Apple told me to use the normal support channels. Did that 3x, an endless loop. So that route won't work. I need an e-mail/contact of Apple in NL whom my lawyer can talk to, so we can start a procedure. I hate that, but I am running out of options. My endgame: ensure that I can keep using ***@me.com as my e-mail address, nothing else, I don't want to unlock devices with it, I don't want to make purchases, just receive my mail till Apple comes with Quantum 1 that will make e-mail obsolete
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In this cautionary tale I have some extra information that is not in the public web yet. Apple moved away from tolerating answers to security questions with errors in spacing, interpunction and capitals. All is now counted. So one space too much, one capital in wrong order : no access
To my knowledge, that has always been policy, seeing how the secured information is hashed and preserved the way it was inputted.
Some in this thread thought otherwise and referred to info from 2017 that said the opposite
They have changed account verification dozens of times. The crux is that since 2012, after two Wired articles "blowing the lid" on what had been a functional, but not very secure password reset process just for the purposes of clickbait, no one in Apple Support can manually reset your password (or remove account lockouts added later for new device login, etc). They can only feed your answers into the same black box as you, and hope for the best. In 2012 security questions were case sensitive for sure. The case sensitivity has possibly been dropped and reintroduced multiple times.
Like Google, they're caught up on the fact that 2FA absolutism leads to irretrievable lockout for dozens of users every single day - I worked Account Security in 2012 and it was hundred a day in that first rollout, because Apple didn't want to alarm people by telling them to write down their security answers during creation or risk permanent account loss - and both companies are constantly trying to introduce some slack into account verification/recovery with little tweaks that are never published, lest Wired immediately set out to prove they can be gamed by bad actors for clickbait once again. So the labyrinth changes from one year to the next.
It's not about account security. It's about avoiding gotcha Wired articles that scare away future customers with how "easy" it is to hack your Apple ID. Apple ID Account Security was fine before 2012. The only thing missing from the old system, where chat support could reset literally any account just because they were convinced you were you, was a way to seal accounts out of chat reset that were being serially targeted by bad actors who possessed significant identifying information on the owners, i.e. people who had already experienced deep identity theft anyway. Otherwise everyone could make their account as secure or open as they wished.
As chabig noted on page 3, your OP issue seems to be that you were adding an account to syspref that had never been provisioned for iCloud before (just Mobile Me and IMAP), and that triggered some edge-case 2FA verification loop which Apple may not even have intentionally put in place. (Whereas when adding the same account directly to Mail App prefs, it does not trigger iCloud provisioning.)
And also the APP store is working fine . So mail works fine on existing machines, not new ones, App Store works fine, I just can’t activate 2FA because of the endless verification loop ..
Oh this makes me so mad! x-x
May luck be with you, as rationality and reason have left the loop a long time ago - approximately some time shortly after the finalization of the architectural planning process. (RIP Steve?✨)
Further..
May this be you last Apple computer?
You are obviously free to decide for yourself and I know the ups- & downs, yet I for my part am rather happy to have decided just that on the utterly ridiculous half decade of keybard disgrace generation macbooks.
Enough is enough.
(feel free to think this post is dumb - a decade younger me may have agreed)
No, the M1 rocks. I just want my mail on it, which is impossible for now hence this thread
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Right, iTunes / app store login is the baseline, default function of Apple IDs, but Mobile Me, IMAP, iCloud require/required provisioning events. After the 2FA introduction in 2012, the other sticking point was that retrofiting it to existing accounts that only had two security questions, and some of which did not have any attached MobileMe or iTunes billing info, was itself a giant security vulnerability - bad actors could easily use the event that is supposed to make the account more secure, iCloud provisioning in Apple's case and manual 2FA setup in Google's case, to take over the account permanently now that support was no longer able to reset password based on human judgment.
What to do? Introduce a set of ID marker goalposts during 2FA, which not every account will have enough ID markers to meet. Apple added the known device algorithm to their labyrinth as the major ID marker, backed up by ad-hoc forms of account lockout exactly like what you are encountering in your OP. Everything is improvised and clandestine. Which leads to the point that there's no reason to even assume the security answers you entered are wrong in any way. It is easily possible that the lockout doesn't even have your answers to check against, because the answers lacked some secret digital fingerprint due to being created before 2012.
Sorry if you've already answered, but isn't it still possible to simply go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts and add any account you want? The Big Sur user guide says it is.
It was possible all the time yes. But not anymore on m1. To access my mail on M1 I did go to internet accounts but came in the verification loop that started this thread.
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Every day I try to answer the security questions with a slight variation in capitals and spacing , I calculated that there are 128 variations. I don’t have 128 streets where I lived or 128 best friends, I just stick to the same answers . It is so frustrating because I know my password is working fine ...
Try setting up and using a different iCloud account... then adding the desired one to mail as per the other suggestions. You can't be signed in to two iCloud accounts, so it may bypass the current issue and just add the mail aspect.
Then I just would look for a different mail app, though I don't know what works on Apple silicon yet - sorry if that has already been suggested, too.
I had to do that with my mother-in-law. I finally got to a real person, and had to answer a wide variety of questions, including her credit card number. I had to do that several times over 5 years. I finally just entered my responses to her security questions, and wrote them down. She could, oddly, remember my answers but not hers.
I also discovered, from an Apple 'engineer', that if you don't answer the password or security questions correctly in three tries, your password is 'changed', and you can't log in, no matter how hard you try, and even if you do enter the right information. That, hopefully has changed, but it sure added to her stress, and my angst.
I don't know how I got to the person that took the answers over the phone, but once I got there, they got her working again. The wife is experiencing something similar, only it's with an alias. Her .me.com address is locked, and the only way Apple could screw it up worse was to create another totally unrelated alias and assign it to her account. They claimed they couldn't save her old alias. What did Apple screw up to make this happen to users. She had a lot of people that contacted her through that me.com address. Now it's unreachable. Maddening... And the Apple 'engineer' made it worse.
Sorry this turned into a rant. Apple should make it easier to recover accounts. Like they did a few years ago. ARG!
<-- is happy that he never set up an email account through Apple...!
OP:
I'm sensing that perhaps the only way forward that's going to work for you is to create a NEW email account for the new Mac.
And to gradually "move over" old emails to the new account (even if the old emails still have your old email address).
OP:
I'm sensing that perhaps the only way forward that's going to work for you is to create a NEW email account for the new Mac.
And to gradually "move over" old emails to the new account (even if the old emails still have your old email address).
If the total app purchase total isn’t too high for you, i would repurchase. That is what I did with a new ID. I took stock of the apps I still wanted to keep and repurchased them using the new account.