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An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

empty.coffee

171–180 of 298 posts

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is not secure full stop. Don't do any kind of sensitive conversation over it regardless of where it is hosted.

Email using most large providers is transmitted using TLS

TLS is unaffected by any government laws. What I assume OP is referencing is a law that makes end to end encryption problematic in Australia but Fastmail has never offered end to end encryption. Neither do most email providers so it doesn't matter.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#172
post #117

I must be the only person who doesn't receive spam. I mean I do, but it goes into the spam folder. I've never really understood why I should use something like this. I have my email address on my website anyway, so it's not like it's private information.

Low-quality spam veeery rarely makes it to my inbox, but “opt-out newsletters after signup” are basically how every business operates nowadays. And that’s spam as far as I’m concerned.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#173

> you probably don’t want to use a random address for critical services such as online banking. Why not?

Because it’s a potential pain.

I just used Hide my email for a non-critical but real-life situation. I had to learn my new email address and I’ll have to remember it forever. I’ll probably change it back to my regular address at some point.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#174
post #114

Unfortunately, I found that Hide My Email complicates unsubscribing. I tried unsubscribing from Jumba Juice many times unsuccessfully, only to realize that the email that I entered was my actual email, and I should enter the email that was shared to Jumba Juice instead.

That’s true, you have to be aware of the email address you used in every service instead of blindly entering your email address.

But you can also deactivate the email address and be done with it.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#175
post #98
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely some attorneys would be interested in a class-action.

According to https://www.xfinity.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/Subscri... you have to give up your rights to a class action and a jury trial to get Comcast service. Additionally, they spend a ton of money lobbying and otherwise unfairly impeding competition, so in many places in the US, they are the only option, so it's give up your civil rights to lawsuits, or stay offline (or pay a wireless carrier who does the…

"If you use our service, you can not sue us." Would that even hold up in court...?

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#177

I have a unique email address for every single service that I sign up for, similar to this, though selfhosted. I've been doing this for years and it works wonderfully. If someone misuses my email address, or gets annoying, I can simply turn off the address. Bam! It's the easiest Postfix config in the universe, essentially just: virtual_alias_domains = domain1.com domain2.com virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/vir…

I've set up a catch-all SMTP server for my domain and now I make up unique addresses on the fly. It simply forwards everything to gmail. Was too lazy to set up sending.

Thanks to this setup, I've already encountered one instance of a company either leaking or selling their customer information.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#178
post #91
post #49

The most popular open-source alternatives are SimpleLogin[1] and AnonAddy[2]. The former one was just acquired by ProtonMail[3]. [1] https://github.com/simple-login/app/ [2] https://github.com/anonaddy/anonaddy [3] https://protonmail.com/blog/proton-and-simplelogin-join-forc...

Mozilla also has Firefox Relay: https://relay.firefox.com/ (Disclosure: I'm on the Relay team.)

Any thoughts on improving the situation on self-hosting? I've written about the situation for Firefox Accounts (FXA, a dependency of Relay if you don't want to use third-party hosted services) here before[0][1] and Relay looks kind of similar.

When comparing Relay with the other two, I get the impression that SimpleLogin/AnonAddy actually interact with the community and understand that self-hosting is something people want to do and provide approachable documentation and support for that, whereas Firefox Relay seems built only with a single global prod deployment in mind and is more like "well theoretically you could but you're on your own and who would do that anyway?". Even if it's public and under an open license, the intended audience is Mozilla internal, e.g. [2]

Like, if a user signs up for Relay today and in 2 years Mozilla sunsets it, the way things looks today I think it wouldn't be viable even for most seasoned self-hosters to migrate to their own deployment.

I do appreciate the work you guys are doing and I think the engineers seem to have good intentions, so don't want to be overly critical. But mentioning it as open source alongside SimpleLogin and AnonAddy comes with some major caveats IMO, and I'd wish that some more priority is put on keeping docs complete and up to date and making the stack realistically approachable for outsiders.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30727935

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315816

[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay#optional-enable-...

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#179
Hang on, though: doesn't this essentially hand Apple a big list of which domains you communicate with and how frequently? There's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through. I know a lot of people trust Apple more than Google, but you're essentially signing up for a vendor-locked product that you're hoping Apple will continue to support, with no guarantee they won't collect - even at an aggregate level - your communication preferences.

They're even slightly pre-filtered for Apple's convenience, as the times you're likely to use Hide My Email are for shopping and social media - nice, ripe marketing targets.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#180
post #91
post #49

The most popular open-source alternatives are SimpleLogin[1] and AnonAddy[2]. The former one was just acquired by ProtonMail[3]. [1] https://github.com/simple-login/app/ [2] https://github.com/anonaddy/anonaddy [3] https://protonmail.com/blog/proton-and-simplelogin-join-forc...

Mozilla also has Firefox Relay: https://relay.firefox.com/ (Disclosure: I'm on the Relay team.)

I use mozmail and on the fly emails are great but so easy to exploit and spam.

For example, my custom domain is foo.mozmail.com. I enter my on the fly email address bar@foo.mozmail.com on attackers website. Voila. Now they know my custom domain name "foo" and can use it to send email to all possible on the fly addresses. e.g. 1@foo.mozmail.com 2@foo.mozmail.com so on and so forth.

Now my custom domain name as a whole is compromised but I can not change it anymore and lost all benefits of Firefox relay.

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