I realized I was using an old email address for my Apple account. Besides some bizarre rules which make it hard to juggle active and backup emails, they send broken confirmation emails.

Here’s what I read:

Just click the link below to verify, sign in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts.

Verify Now >

Yes. That’s the link. They oh so helpfully took the HTML part of the email:

Just click the link below to verify, sign =
in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts. <br><br><a hr=
ef=3D"https://id.apple.com/..." cla=
ss=3D"aapl-link" style=3D"color:#0088cc">Verify Now ></a>

And converted it to text for me. Thanks! The ... part of that, btw, is about 400 chars of base64 encoded something. I approve, except unquoting and line folding it by hand is quite the chore. The strangest part is I have three slightly different emails from Apple, regarding my primary email, my backup email, and my security questions. Some of them have the above link, but omit other links.