Problems with my apple id since iCloud

Question

I have read here that a lot of people can't get there mobile me mail.  I can't either on the iCloud site but it works fine in my imac mail program.  What I mean is I can send and receive mail thru my me.com email address.  I just can't get it on iCloud. 
However it appears I have a problem with my me.com address and my Apple ID.  I can't use itunes or the app store on my mac or on my iPhone.  When I try to it says that I need to merge my mac.com email address and my Apple ID (they are different). 
When I try and sign in to say iCloud it says I have to merge the 2 and from now on my Apple ID will be my me.com email address.  Takes me to a page that is my account.  Has my Apple ID on it and right there there is a button that says to merge the two so from now on I'll use the me.com address as my sign in.  But when I hit that button to merge them it won't do it. 
When I try to use the App store on my iphone it says my Apple ID is not verified and says Hit OK to learn how to verify it.  When I do that I get a screen called verify your account.  And it says there that my email address is already verified to another Apple ID.  Which is true its to my Apple ID that I got years ago with the first gen ipod (I didn't have an iMac then). 
So now I'm stuck.  I can't get any apps, I can't get into iCloud, I can't seem to change my Apple ID, and I can't make either the old Apple ID or the me.com email address work as my Apple ID. 
So now what?
Susan

Answer 1

I'll add my problem to this list as it sounds similar. First a little background. This is a problem I think we will see from a lot of long term users, so here is my story. When .Mac was first made available I signed up and was given a new apple ID [email protected] At this point I already had an Apple ID that I was using for just music purposes (apps didnt't exist yet) but was told by apple I would have to give it up. They could not merge IDs and would not change them. The end result was getting a new Apple ID and having to redownload all my purchased music over P2P or burn it and  re-rip to remove the DRM. Fast forward a bit to a time when Gmail is getting bigger. I'm invited to try it out and I decide that I'm going to stop paying $100 for email, as I never really used he other features iDisk, photo sharing etc, and syncing contacts, calendars and mail was just as easy through gmail. Now years later we have iCloud. I have to sign in with my outdated .mac ID, at this point I have for too many apps/music/shows to drop that ID. When I sign in with that .mac Apple ID I get the automated iCloud message telling me my new email address is [email protected] However when I go to send email from my iCloud account it is using .mac as the sending address and the mail will not go through. I can't change it in the mail app or in settings. I'm kind of at a loss as to where to go next. I'm stuck with a defunct email address as a username that is more or less a key to thousands of dollars worth of content, and a new email address that won't function and nobody at Apple can press the right buttons to help clean it up. Some kind of system should be in place to change a user ID. Maybe once a year or once every other year. **** at this point I would even pay a one time fee just for my user name to be rid of that old .mac extension.