Custom Email Domain stuck in “Verifying your domain”
In case this is helpful to others experiencing what I did. Last year (or so) when Apple offered custom email domains for iCloud+ (which is a great feature IMO), I set up two custom email domains for domains I had already owned and one email address for each of them. It was a little rocky getting it going, but within a day or so, I had them both working. Recently, I tried to add email addresses to one of them, but I got this warning message: “Verifying your domain. This usually takes a few minutes but could take up to 24 hours. You’ll be able to continue when verification is complete.” Now understand, the existing email on this domain was working fine, so it didn’t make sense that Apple needed to re-verify the account. There was a button that said “Reverify,” but it was not active. Nothing else in the dialog box gave any indication of what was wrong or what steps I could take to fix.
In between the time that I originally set up the custom domains and when I attempted to add another email user, I had transferred the domain from one registrar (iPage, if that’s important) to another (Cloudflare, since it was lower cost and Apple-recommended.) All the DNS records were transferred intact, so it seemed to me that shouldn’t have been an issue. But after a frustrating phone call with Apple Support, I deleted one of the custom email domains, and re-initiated it. Now it’s working as expected. Apparently, if you change domain registrars, you need to re-initialize the custom email domain to be able to add email users. That seems to be a bug, but at least that work-around worked for me.
Caution: if you delete the custom email domain, make sure you can get a verification email for the setup process for the email address you just deleted, since you’ll need the unique identifier to Apple in that email for it to work. That was a frustrating step for me.
Since I couldn’t find anything helpful in an Apple Support article, in this Discussions forum, on my Support call, or in a general internet search, I thought I would post my experience for others who might encounter the same issue. I hope this saves someone the frustration I experienced.
