Apple ID email cannot be reused to other Apple ID even when deselected

Question

Hello
I a in the same situation as many of us, with one @me.com Apple ID (created via MobileMe) and a separate Apple ID where all my purchases are.
Having accepted that there is no merge, I went on to change the primary email addresses in those accounts.
For the Apple ID xxxxx I had a primary email address of [email protected] and for the [email protected] Apple ID I had a primary email of [email protected]
So as I am only using the @me.com EMAIL, i wanted to change the primary emails. So I have deleted the [email protected] email adress from the xxxxx Apple ID and verified a new one.
Then I went on to the [email protected] Apple ID settings and tried to change the primary email to [email protected]
However the system prompted that this is not possible, as that email is in use by another Apple ID (apparently my old one). Do you know if it takes some time for the server to update those infos, or it is that once you verify an email address, then this address is bound to the apple ID, even if you choose to delete it from it?

Answer 1

I think I'm in a similar situation.  Earlier this week I upgraded my iTunes for Win7 to the most recent version, and then upgraded my iPad to iOS5.  As part of this iOS5 upgrade, I was prompted to sign into my existing iTunes account.  But when I tried to do this, iTunes refused to accept my existing user name, apparently because it wasn't an email address.  (They didn't require user names to be email addresses five years ago when I originally created the account.)  They required me to create a new iTunes/Apple ID account, and required that my new Apple ID user name be an email address.  So of course I tried to use the email address from my existing iTunes account, and that's where I ran into my issue.
My existing account, which the new iTunes no longer allows me to sign into, used a Yahoo email address for communication purposes.  When I was forced to create a new iTunes account, since it requires an email address for a user name (AKA my Apple ID), naturally I wanted to use the same email address for my new user name that I have been using for communications on my old account.  But even though I can no longer sign into the old account, iTunes still remembers the email address I used with it, shows it as active for a user (Yes!  Me!!) and won't let me use it as my new Apple user ID name.
At least on it's face, this seems dumb.  But I have run into this issue with forums and accounts that I used once years ago, didn't use for a long time, and then tried to log into again.  The software won't let me use the old account for whatever reason, but it still remembes the information from it, and won't let another user (or me) create an account using the same information.
So my question is, how do I get Apple to let me use the same original email address from my original iTunes account as the user name for my new iTunes account?  Do I have to get Apple to delete my original account (*shudder*) and hope nothing bad comes from it, and then once the system forgets that I used this Yahoo address before, change my new Apple ID to the Yahoo address?