One of my readers, Markus, sent me a very polite email asking me how the experiment with the iCloud aliases went.
I really apologize for not writing about the results earlier than this. I’ve spent more time in the airports in the past two weeks than at home. In any case, no excuses…
Here are the results of the little experiment. First of all, I’ve discovered that iCloud differs from MobileMe for the number of aliases you can create:
- MobileMe allows you to create up to five aliases
- iCloud allows you to create only three aliases
When you migrate from MobileMe to iCloud, all five aliases are carried over. It turns out that they are fully functional but you cannot rename them.
As soon as you delete two of them, therefore reaching the maximum value of aliases allowed in iCloud then the remaining aliases can be renamed.
For the sake of this blog I sacrificed two of my old aliases and verified this. With three aliases you don’t get the error “Your preferences couldn’t be saved” anymore.
I need to edit this post after discussing this issue with Markus and after tracing back the steps on how I carried out my test. For intellectual honesty I must say that I made a mistake earlier on and I apologize to all my readers.
In my experiment, I actually managed to verify that even if you delete two aliases and therefore remain with three – the maximum number of aliases allowed in iCloud – you still cannot rename the full name of an alias. The result is the error “Your preferences couldn’t be saved”.
There seems to be a limitation with the aliases migrated from MobileMe. They are all read-only.
In order to be able to edit any value in an iCloud alias that was migrated from MobileMe you need to delete that alias and recreate it as a native iCloud alias. As Markus reminded me in the comments, the problem is you cannot recreate an alias straight away but only after seven days.
That’s a problem for people who rely heavily on aliases. I am not sure that Apple sees this as a bug but more likely as a limitation. Surely the error message triggered could’ve been chosen a bit better.
Sadly this does not work for me. I also had 5 aliases and deleted two of them. Still the error shows up when trying to rename an alias
Sorry to hear that Markus.
Have you tried to totally delete the alias and create it from scratch? I wonder if the problem is still with the migrated alias. Feel free to contact me if you want to troubleshoot this together.
Pietro
Hi Pietro, no i haven’t tried that. Is it possible to delete an alias and immediately create a new one with the same name? I thought there is a waiting period of 7 days. That would be a breaker for me since I need all remaining aliases every day.
Cheers,
Markus
Yes there is a waiting period of 7 days, you’re right. I completely forgot about that.
It looks like that I was somehow lucky in my test. Interesting, and not good for people that wants to rename the full name of an alias.
Markus,
I think you’re right. I thought things over and back-traced the steps I followed to rename the full name of the alias and I remembered that I had to delete it in the first place.
I’ve amended the post to reflect this. Thanks a lot for your useful feedback. We haven’t found a solution suitable for your scenario but at least we have managed to draw some conclusions.
I really hope other readers can benefit from our tests.
Best regards,
Pietro
I tried iCloud and dropped it after seeing that I could not use aliases. I have multiple email addresses professional and personal .com and .com and I aggregate all my mail into gmail. I am using sparrow mail and can create aliases as well as use gmail to send email from the different addresses or other; the limitation on iCloud to use only @me.com aliases is useless to me; so I will stick with gmail. I tried also to synchronize contacts with my macbook and iPhone and found that it screwed completely my phone contacts adding systematically USA country code +1, when I actually have for a contact a US phone number and a european one (yes there is such a thing of having people actually having different country codes for numbers). The multiple group creation for iPhone contacts and macbook creates duplicates. I feel that syncing with google contacts through exchange setting is much more reliable. So I am definitely not a fan of iCloud and will not adopt it until they get these points solved.
Since migrating to iclould I have tried to create aliases, it says I have 3 of 3 left. When I try it says I deleted one recently and must wait 7 days. Ive waited two weeks, (I dont really remember having deleted anything as it happens) but still cannot create and alias, I just get the same message.
Any ideas.
Hi Hilda,
Not really. I seem to understand that you’ve never created any alias before.
That seems weird. I’d say that it could be a glitch with your account. I’d try to get in touch with Apple through Express Lane support if that is an option.
Maybe some other readers have any idea?
Best regards,
Pietro