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An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

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Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#281

Post by Hippocrates »

This feature is indeed amazing, but my biggest complaint is that it's not easier to access. Roughly speaking, the worse the website, the less I trust it with my email, the less likely their HTML is well formed and will trigger iOS to prompt me to use Hide My Email.

Way too frequently I have to dig this feature out of the settings menu, copy the address to the site, copy the site back to Hide My Email as a label, and then usually do the same hoop-jumping with my password manager.

I would welcome this feature to be more front-and-center on the keyboard somehow.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#282

Post by saimiam »

z8 wrote: post #244
smartbit wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your app available?

Not as of right now, but I could put it on GitHub. It's essentially just a front end for the Gandi.net email management API. Manually editing the alias list gets cumbersome really quickly.

Also interested. Please put it on GH.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#283

Post by astrostl »

binwiederhier wrote: post #39

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 did this with my own domain. Then sold the domain, and it was an absolute nightmare to go change my email registration everywhere because asking the buyer to forward a bajillion emails to me was overbearing. Never again!

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#284

Post by bpugh »

binwiederhier wrote: post #39

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 just wish it was this easy to do with physical mail as well...

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#285

Post by tlavoie »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #99
b1n wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking of a new way to use my email... - Only use one email address: hi@example.com - Always add a filter: hi+hn@example.com - Send all emails without a filter to SPAM Since it's not a common strategy, it is much more likely that spammers remove the +hn before sending an email than add one.

I have tried this approach. Unfortunately, some services will not accept plus sign in the username no matter what RFC says. On top of that, some services seem to not like seeing the service name in the username. I.e. foo.tld will refuse sending email to mailbox+foo@mydomain.tld.

Some MTAs (Postfix at least) allows other characters. I use an underscore, which seems universally accepted. For the second problem, there's usually some alternative mangling that would still be unique-enough, or just flee because they seem too aggressive on the data harvesting.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#286

Post by paraxion »

spsful wrote: post #187
paraxion wrote: post #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 aggregat…

If you use Gmail, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through. If you use Outlook, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through. If you use Yahoo, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through. If you use virtually any email provider this is true.

Oh, absolutely that's true; even with privacy-focused, hosted systems like Proton or FastMail there's always that tiny shadow of doubt that they're doing what they're saying they do.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#287

Post by m0dest »

yellow_postit wrote: post #86

Love the service but nervous on the lock-in. Any guides for how to migrate off Apple after using lots of emails? I’ve been happy with the Fastmail+1Password integration as that “feels” less painful to migrate off the in the future.

This is the million dollar question that Apple hasn't answered. What happens to these forwarding addressses if you cancel iCloud+?

The result is bad either way. It's either A or B. (A) Canceling iCloud+ doesn't remove existing Hide My Email addresses - which makes it possible to abuse by creating tons of extra addresses before canceling. Or: (B) Canceling iCloud+ deletes all of your Hide My Email addresses, locking you out of dozens of services (e.g. anything that sends an email as a MFA).

I suspect that it is actually (A). Someone just needs to test this and report out.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#288

Post by justsomehnguy »

gruez wrote: post #273
justsomehnguy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's obviously false if you bothered to do a bit of searching Technically correct, best kind of correct. Sure, it is not plaintext, but anyone with the access to the wire could MITM the connections. Maaaaybe something changed in the last ten years, but I never seen someone not accepting a connection with a self-issued certificate and any warnings (to the end user) if the receiver uses self-issued cert. Which make…

>but anyone with the access to the wire could MITM the connections. Maaaaybe something changed in the last ten years The section on MTA-STS describes how that attack is mitigated.

> mitigated

For this attack to be mitigated everyone should implement it. Gmail and Live.com has MTA-STS records, Fastmail doesn't, one regional provider with millions of accounts doesn't have it too.

And finally your MTA should support it and be configured to deny the delivery if MTA-STS validation fails (and adversary, who is happily MITMing your traffic, shouldn't fiddle with DNS and HTTPS and of course blocking HTTP/S from the MX would be considered cheating!).

All in all, SMTP traffic is encrypted, but it is not secured.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#289

Post by Liquid_Fire »

masklinn wrote: post #271
mulmen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if you have a relatively common name it avoids people giving your email address then behaving aggressively when you tell them to stop. I’ve had a few friends hit this issue. I’m sorry, I can’t parse this. Can you try again? I used @ . My name was never involved in the address.

> I used @ . My name was never involved in the address. That's the point, if you don't use your name in your address, you can't be @ , which third parties will provide as their email, Because I use the same scheme you do I've never had that issue, but several friends with common names have hit the issue having registered to more "normal" hosts, often as somewhat early adopters and thus having gotten their pick.

I have a very uncommon name (though not unique) and I've had people mistakenly signing up for services with my firstname.lastname@gmail.com (which I don't usually sign up to services with).

The annoying thing is the number of services these days that don't seem to require you to verify your email. Examples of the above included eBay and Spotify. On both occasions I had to contact support to ask them to delete the account.

Re: An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

#290

Post by earthboundkid »

guywithabike wrote: post #106
earthboundkid wrote: post #101

How do I report Hide My Email abuse? Someone used it to send a nasty email to my company. I couldn’t figure out how to report it. My guess is there is no way to do it and there won’t be until after some reporters make it the Apple scandal of the week when there’s no other news.

Have you tried emailing abuse@icloud.com?

I will try forwarding it there. Thanks.
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