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iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

developer.apple.com

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Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#71

Post by nailer »

dannyw wrote: post #34
giwook wrote: post #33

Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I'm reading some of the comments here and I feel like I'm missing something here.

For the "hide my email" feature, Apple currently and has always used "@icloud.com". This masks you amongst all iCloud users. They were planning to change it to a custom domain, which would allow sites to easily filter out and reject "Hide my email" users based on the email. They have now reverted their plans to change this, meaning "hide my email" is still "@icloud.com".

I suspect many people actually feel better about Apple owning this fuckup and reversing it than they would have Apple hadn't fucked up in the first place.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#72

Post by riddlemethat »

kqp wrote: post #58

This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail. Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who…

I configured about a dozen domains to have MX records for the mailinator disposable inbox service for about a decade for free as a gift and the domains were toxic for any other email use case for years afterwards… they were so abused you couldn’t even sign up for most web services with any email associated by the time I stopped renewing them… there are still GitHub lists of disposable email addresses that list to blacklist those domains (and many other), so, I agree. If the big providers don’t offer disposable email addresses there is no good option.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#73

Post by TheDong »

consumer451 wrote: post #44
HeavenFox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point: many websites block all VPN except iCloud Private Relay. Thank you Apple!

Seriously, Apple is "big tech," but they are the only one that appears to give a crap about privacy at all. And really, they put a lot of money and effort into it. We need to give kudos when they are due. Apple's Private Cloud Compute should have won some kind of Nobel Privacy Prize, which for some reason does not yet exist.

They still don't let me install uBlock origin + noscript. Whitelisting per-domain and per-site what can run Javascript does more for my privacy than anything else, and I can do that with firefox on linux and android, but on iOS I'm not allowed to install firefox.

There's obviously no real technical limitation since if you live in the EU you can sideload an alternative browser in theory (though apple has made it unrealistic in practice since they're ignoring the spirit of the law and instead doing their darndest to resist giving users even a whit of freedom).

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#74

Post by drdexebtjl »

MBCook wrote: post #23
Marsymars wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bounce rate of what, exactly? Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design. Whenever I start getting spam at an address that's been leaked, I deactivate it. I've done the same with my oldest gmail account, but the work required there is notably higher.

If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues. Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private o…

Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. There’s no easy-to-check pattern.

They’re not switching the subdomain. They’re keeping it the same. That’s the news.

They’re switching the subdomain for the “Sign in with Apple” sign ups, which is not the same service.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#75

Post by HeavenFox »

dymk wrote: post #55
travoc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.

That doesn’t explain how the user is held “hostage” by Apple

Hostage may be a bad analogy. More like a game of chicken. Imagine you are a regular @icloud.com email user. Apple is basically saying "I dare you to block all @icloud.com email and lose all these customers"

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#76

Post by drdexebtjl »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #41

I'm a bit confused - when i see these signups, they look like this to me: rtwnj6tj7@privaterelay.appleid.com

How many sign ups you have with an @icloud.com address?

A lot of those are Hide My Email aliases that, by design, you can’t tell apart from real human addresses.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#77

Post by kqp »

glenngillen wrote: post #65
kqp wrote: post #58

This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail. Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who…

Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details. I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons: - if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam - similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my…

I agree with all of this. I’d add that it’s useful for sorting and searching. Things like keyword matching, from address, and from domain aren’t as consistent as you’d hope, but companies do need to actually email the address they were given, so you can use it to reliably identify emails from them.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#78

Post by nunez »

riddlemethat wrote: post #72
kqp wrote: post #58

This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail. Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who…

I configured about a dozen domains to have MX records for the mailinator disposable inbox service for about a decade for free as a gift and the domains were toxic for any other email use case for years afterwards… they were so abused you couldn’t even sign up for most web services with any email associated by the time I stopped renewing them… there are still GitHub lists of disposable email addresses that list to bla…

Mailinator was an awesome service when it first worked. Thank you!!!

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#79

Post by wafflemaker »

NotThatFast wrote: post #19

One of the best things about it. Also being able to add several emails per custom domain for free. Whole thing is 99c a month. Makes Gmail seem like a joke in comparison. Until you get an email from an iCloud address on Gmail and see it go right to spam haha. Suddenly Gmail is cheap again

Best thing to do with Gmail spam is to make an auto filter to mark all spam as not spam.

Took me only one missed dentist appointment several years ago to get that idea. Now I'm just getting profits. No other spam since I'm using email aliases.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#80

Post by Marsymars »

xp84 wrote: post #37
saurik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penal…

Is Apple really stupid enough that they BOUNCE emails after you deactivate, rather than just silent discard? What's the point of bouncing unwanted emails these days? It's not like these bounces go to humans who go "Oh, gee! This address must not work. Allow me to go and figure out how to contact him!" It's just a stream of full-on spam with completely fake return addresses, and crap from email campaign software.

I mean my hope is to get the senders' IP/accounts/email reputation flagged for having additional bounces.
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