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Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

arseniyshestakov.com

141–150 of 369 posts

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#141
post #6

> Long story short: now both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email aliases are going to be issued on the @private.icloud.com subdomain. This makes it much easier to ban all aliases without affecting non-relay mailboxes on iCloud mail. Could someone clarify why having Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email on the same domain would make a blanket ban easier rather than harder? What am I missing?

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean "set up an equivalent service" under your own domain, that's both less private and more likely to be blocked; there are a lot of services which, unfortunately, only allow sign-ups from big, well-known domains.

Are there really? I don't think I've ever encountered such a service in all the years I've been using an email address under my own domain. And blocking every email address that's not from a big provider means blocking basically everyone who tries to sign up with their company email, which might not be great for business.

Within the last month both Mapbox and Etsy blocked my attempts to signup using a Proton Mail alias. How many services do you sign up for in recent years, on average? The practice is becoming incredibly common and more than likely you're just grandfathered in.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#143
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway It's not a fake e-mail, it's a legitimate e-mail that you can send e-mail to and the user will receive, which has to be created by a paying iCloud user and not an anonymous rando off the internet. I'd be interested to know what downsides, if any, you see for a website to accept a private e-mail address like this. Do y…

I'm curious what you think the difference is between "a paying iCloud user" and "an anonymous rando off the internet." How many Apple gift cards do you reckon get sent to fraudsters every day? Decades worth of iCloud+ surely.

I'm running a business where I need to know who you are, because my platform can be used defraud other people. If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag.

If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)

If these terms are not acceptable to you, then great! Don't use the website, there's no need to be salty because that's what you said you wanted. Isn't it?

I don't mind either, because the number of legitimate users who are bothered by this restriction is infinitesimal compared to the number of fraudsters who would take advantage if it wasn't in place. It can be difficult to comprehend the scale of platform fraud unless you've worked in this area, many days fraudulent signups outnumber legitimate ones.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#144
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]

There are no true scotsman

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#145
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With cloudflare you can also just setup catch-all and be done wirh it. I personally doing catch-all already, but problem is that using your own domain for website registration basically gives everyone unique id to eaaily connect all the information that ever been leaked for your accounts and something always gets leaked. Not a very good idea for privacy.

The biggest upside for me of having separate labelled mailboxes is I can use one, delete it later and never receive mail from it again.

with something like cloudflare forwarding you can black-hole an address if it becomes a problem

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unsettling, you’re either an iCloud customer for life or hundreds of logins could break.

Nothing breaks when you switch. You just can't create more private icloud addresses. I recently switched back to Android and can still use my old icloud logins.

But what happen if you stop paying $1 / month?

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#148

Pro tip for doing something like this without apple. Buy or get a cheap domain name. Create a subdomain on it and have it catch and forward all messages to you when sent to that sub. For example: nytimes@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail anything-else@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail You dont even need to materialize aliases at all.

SPF/DMARC/DKIM make this all a bit more complicated now. There are plenty of MTAs out there that will refuse to send you mail if it's not all correct.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really? I don't think I've ever encountered such a service in all the years I've been using an email address under my own domain. And blocking every email address that's not from a big provider means blocking basically everyone who tries to sign up with their company email, which might not be great for business.

Yes, espacially exotic tld. I have a ".email" domain name, and I get 2 to 3 instances a year of either rejected forms, or sneakier, just confirmation email that never come until I use a .com address.

I have a 3 character .com as my primary email... it gets rejected more often than I'd like... including at my bank :) I've got a longer more normal domain that I alias, but it annoys me none the less.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s not? Like if they block that subdomain, they will completely block Sign in with Apple.

You can use Hide My Email independently from Sign in with Apple.

I know that, but in doing so you prevent yourself from ever using Sign in with Apple
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