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Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

arseniyshestakov.com

51–60 of 369 posts

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#51
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but I still generated some for myself just in case and fellow hackers can do the same if they want to. iCloud+ was the best $1 / month custom domain email and email alias service with 100GB of E2EE cloud drive. Obviously it will be sad to see it enshittified for seemingly no reason.

[flagged]

You could've at least checked my profile...

Problem is that using of own domain is creating huge privacy and cybersecurity risk since you can track all the person profiles across all the databases ever leaked.

Its nice as vanity item, but it's better not to use same domain across banks, online forums and porn sites. ;-)

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COUGHredditCOUGH

IDK I’ve appreciated Reddit killing off good features like old version, putting a time-lock banner on mobile while logged out, trying to block VPNs when logged out, etc. I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death. What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward n…

[deleted]

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#54
post #46

I guess I don't understand the concern... what does it matter if a different domain is used for Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email?

Because many sites check the domain part of your email address against a blocklist, which contains entries like trashmail.com to prevent users from signing up with ad-hoc throwaway accounts. They don't want that, because they'd like to get a proper lead they can either track, sell, or reach out to.

Now Hide My Email allowed you to do just that: Create an account with an email that wasn't tied to your identity, and that you could just decommission if you didn't need it anymore. Sites had no way to detect these either, because all of the randomly generated addresses Apple provided you with just ended in @icloud.com, which is also used by tons of regular accounts - so if you blocked this domain, you'd invariably preclude millions of people from your service.

But by separating the domains, sites can simply add private.icloud.com to their trash mail blocklist, preventing the use of Hide My Email, while regular @iCloud.com addresses will continue to work. It makes the entire service useless at once.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COUGHredditCOUGH

IDK I’ve appreciated Reddit killing off good features like old version, putting a time-lock banner on mobile while logged out, trying to block VPNs when logged out, etc. I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death. What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward n…

FWIW, old.reddit.com is still there and working

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#56

Okay but banning private relay emails would also mean your site is blocking Apple sign in?

That was always opt-in from the sites, and many never bothered - me included, because I refuse to pay Apple $99 per year for the privilege to offer easier authentication to their users.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#57
post #46

I guess I don't understand the concern... what does it matter if a different domain is used for Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email?

Websites block certain throwaway email domains from signups. The concern is that this will happen with private.icloud.com

A good example of a throwaway email that is now useless because of these blocks is mailinator.com. Originally, you could just make up a random email on the spot like gregsrightfoot@mailinator.com, visit mailinator.com, and get the needed signup verification email. These services autodeleted messages and required no signup so they were a black hole for spam. However websites eventually got wise that their spam wasn’t being seen and started blocking the domain. Mailinator came up with alternative domains and there was a brief back and forth before the throwaway email domains all ended up being blocked.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#58
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before, the emails were "me@icloud.com", the default for all apple users. There was no way to distinguish normal emails from generated private emails. Now, they will be "blah@private.icloud.com", so it will be easy to ban the generated/private email that reduces the ability to associate logins across services. Unclear why Apple would shoot themselves in this way; I hope it's not Ternus complying with anti-privacy.

maybe to avoid getting their legitimate email servers banned by other servers since they host (i.e. being exploited) a growing number of spam accounts.

You cant send mail from Hide My Email aliases. They are only work one way.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#59
post #27

Oh fuck. I love Hide My Email and it's been the best feature about iCloud ever since it came out. It's actually useful compared to Gmail's useless "yourrealaddress+alais" that gives away your actual email anyway, and it helped me catch quite a few spammers/data sellers. Hide My Email addresses already have a peculiar format that others could guess, and some do block those, and there's no reason to add a blatant "priv…

FWIW it's not a gmail thing for privacy, but rather just part of the email spec. RFC 5233 talks about it. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5233/

Did the RFC editor get a makeover recently? It looks familiar, but also kinda… polished. Neat.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#60
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately sometimes we are at some specific provider’s mercy for whatever reason like lack of appropriate alternatives.

COUGHredditCOUGH

I think Reddit falls under this category.

> If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.

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