The vast majority of people have Apple IDs that are email IDs on providers that 
are not iCloud.  The vast majority of these people never take advantage of 
iCloud mail by creating a separate iCloud mail ID.  These people don't have 
your problem — their (main) email password and their Apple ID password are not 
related in any way.

For any one of these folks who does take advantage of iCloud mail by taking the 
time to create a mail id, their password for iCloud mail (specifically) and 
their Apple ID password will always be the same password.  That's just the way 
the service is arranged.  But for most of them, iCloud isn't their main mail 
service, so the security problem is second-order.  Plus, their Apple ID still 
doesn't end in iCloud, because they had to create an Apple ID first before they 
could create an iCloud mail address.

In your case, you somehow created an Apple ID that ends in iCloud.  I know 
other people that have done it, and I'm mildly curious as to how one makes it 
work in that order.  But it's still going to have the same password for that 
mailbox and your Apple cloud services.

I wouldn't sweat the mail.  Anybody can send mail claiming to be anybody, even 
just using a standard mailer like Apple Mail.  But more to the point, anybody 
can register a membership on a website and provide somebody else's email 
address in the registration, either accidentally or on purpose, whereupon that 
poor bastard gets all the subsequent mail.  

(I have an email account on AOL that is so old it's just my last name — and I 
have a world-wide krewe of clones who share my last name either as their last 
or first names, who carelessly sign me up for crap on the Internet all the 
time.  That's life.)  

Such activity says nothing about the security of your password, because actual 
access to your account isn't necessary to the abuse.

> On Mar 5, 2017, at 1:48 AM, Chris Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Since there’s some pretty knowledgeable people on here regarding iCloud I 
> wonder if someone could tell me something about mail and iCloud security.
> 
> At present you sign in to your account using an email address of the form: 
> [email protected] with a long complex password and then follow the security 
> questions - best friend’s name and so on.   FWIW these don’t need to be 
> actual names they can be random characters so long as you don’t forget them.  
> This  one password also gives access to email and all services.
> 
> Is it possible to have a separate password for email or is there just the one 
> for everything?  I can’t see any way of doing a separate one.  
> 
> Reason I ask is that I’ve received a pile of stuff from some gaming site 
> thanking me for signing up - I haven’t - which makes me wonder if someone has 
> hacked the email.  They could simply have picked up the address from 
> somewhere and be trying it on.
> 
> I’ve changed the main iCloud password to be safe but wondered if it’s 
> possible to have a separate one for mail.
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