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What are the pros and cons of creating an Apple profile/ID with a iCloud email address vs something else (e.g. gmail or proton)?

B

blanketdown

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 13, 2025
19
1
I'm going through the initial set up of an iPhone. after asking for my name and birthday, it asked for an email. There's a a blue link that says "Don't have an email address?". When I click that, it says "You can get a free iCloud email address to use with your account."

What are the pros and cons of creating an Apple profile/ID using an iCloud email address versus using some other email (like gmail or proton)?

thansk.
 
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As far as your Apple Account is concerned, I don't see that it matters. Your choice(s) of email provider(s) is a different matter. But whatever you like should work.

As an aside, setting up an iCloud email can be useful. You don't need to use it for you Aoole Account credentials, but it may be useful to have for other purposes.

Also, regardless of what email you use for your Apple Account, it would probably be wise to look at Hide My eMail and use that judiciously. You may even want to look at places and things you already use and consider changing you email address to a unique Hide My eMail address. Just opinion.
 
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aihpcfl said:
As far as your Apple Account is concerned, I don't see that it matters. Your choice(s) of email provider(s) is a different matter. But whatever you like should work.
Click to expand...
i'm worried that if I leave the Apple ecosystem, that Apple will cancel my iCloud email address.
Because what I understand is that iCloud email is available only to owners of Apple devices
 
blanketdown said:
i'm worried that if I leave the Apple ecosystem, that Apple will cancel my iCloud email address.
Because what I understand is that iCloud email is available only to owners of Apple devices
Click to expand...
As far as the email account, your Apple Account aside, I guess it is a valid concern, but then it is not different than leaving an ISP and losing the ISP email address. Or if you used something like Proton email and then at some point decided to cancel your Proton account. You have to keep track of where you used the email accounts and change them ahead of time, not try and do it afterward.

I don't use my iCloud email for my Apple account because when I created the account I used the email I was using at the time and hadn't even set up iCloud email. Nowadays, I don't see any reason to do anything differently.
 
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You can still access icloud mail if you switch to an adroid device. The Hide My Email function is fantastic. No one besides family gets my "real" icloud address so thats great for security purposes. Every entity I have contact with has their own address so that if I want to cease receiving email from them, I simply delete that Hide My Email address. You do have to have an Icloud + sub for 99 cents per month with 50gb of cloud storage but well worth it.
Also, Icloud recognizes spam just as well as google does so no issue there.
 
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fsfty said:
You can still access icloud mail if you switch to an adroid device. The Hide My Email function is fantastic. No one besides family gets my "real" icloud address so thats great for security purposes. Every entity I have contact with has their own address so that if I want to cease receiving email from them, I simply delete that Hide My Email address. You do have to have an Icloud + sub for 99 cents per month with 50gb of cloud storage but well worth it.
Also, Icloud recognizes spam just as well as google does so no issue there.
Click to expand...
Hide My email sounds like a great service. I use something similar and no fees. Unfortunately, some places (like apple account) don't accept the ”hidden” addresses I provide.
 
There's really no difference between the two. Basically, do you want your Apple Account's primary email address to be something like 'johndoe@icloud.com' or 'johndoe@gmail.com'? If you go with the latter, you can always get an @icloud.com email address later and change that to be your Apple Account's primary email address if you wanted to. (If you do the former, you can still change the primary email address to something else, but you're stuck with the @icloud.com that remains linked to your Apple Account.)

As for the 'Hide My Email' feature people are talking about, you don't even need an @icloud.com address to use that. I use it all the time with my @outlook.com email, which is what I use for my Apple account. The only thing I can't do is use the web interface (icloud.com) to send those initial hidden emails. I have to use the Mail app on my Mac, iPhone, or iPad to send those initial hidden emails from my Outlook account. However, once that initial hidden email is sent, I can then continue using Outlook or outlook.com to reply to those conversations and still have my address be hidden.
 
fsfty said:
I’ve never had any entity refuse an Apple hide my email address. I currently have over 100 active hide my email addresses and it’s never happened.
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It’s pretty neat. I use it everywhere now! It’s really nice to know which company gets their data leaked, since you start receiving spam email from that address only.

I believe I only had it declined once on a hosting provider, but they seemed to reject everything except Gmail. Otherwise, it seems to work everywhere.
 
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