If you use iCloud Mail, you may have noticed by now that your emails are not arriving, or are having difficulties accessing the web interface or your account in Apple’s stock iOS Mail app and third-party email clients.
If so, you’re among a tiny 0.1 percent of users who’ve been unable to receive mail for 20 hours and counting, according to Apple’s iCloud dashboard on the web…
The affected users are reporting seeing a ‘Cannot Get Mail: iCloud is currently unavailable’ message.
“Users may be unable to receive iCloud mail,” reads a notice on Apple’s iCloud status page. “0.1 percent of users are affected.” The issue was first recorded at 1:30PM PT yesterday and still persists.
Though 0.1 percent may seem like a tiny fraction of the installed user base, this translates into some 300,000 people, based on the 300 million iCloud users milestone Apple CEO Tim Cook shared on stage at the WWDC last month.
I’m not experiencing issues accessing iCloud Mail, but of course your mileage may vary. Are you affected by this issue?
A word of caution: if you’re currently using iCloud Mail as your recovery email account for your Apple ID – don’t.
Assuming I stole your device and you have iCloud Mail set up on it and don’t use two-factor authentication, I could theoretically use Apple’s Apple ID webpage to initiate a password reset and then open the message directly on your device to change your Apple ID password.
Therefore, it’s best to not use your iCloud Mail account as your Apple ID’s recovery email address. And if I were you, I’d never set up iCloud Mail on my device in order to minimize risk in case it gets stolen.