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Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

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Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#331

Post by Someone »

cavoirom wrote: post #301
danpalmer wrote: post #252

Hide My Email is fundamentally broken in two major ways: 1. Services those emails are used with cannot unilaterally send email to them. They must pre-register how they will send email to them, which breaks services with third-party relationships such as online retail with payment processors or shipping companies. Users don't like not receiving shipping notifications, and users don't like not seeing invoices or at wor…

For now I think Hide My Email is for power users! It's on the user side to manage their identities. My current workflow: - Label Hide My Email with the service name I registered with it. Add number or nickname if I have multiple accounts on that service. - Add an email rules to move the email addressed to that Hide My Email addressuu to a separate inbox. - Use the same label in password manager, also save the email t…

> For now I think Hide My Email is for power users! It's on the user side to manage their identities. My current workflow:

> - Label Hide My Email with the service name I registered with it.

I think the ‘normal’ way to do it is way simpler:

- a site asks for an email address

- click “Hide My Email”

- use Apple’s flow to create a new email address

- use Apple’s flow to pick a password

- phone or Mac automatically associates the email address with the site and stores the password in the KeyChain

AFAICT, the only thing that doesn’t do that you describe is “Add an email rules to move the email addressed to that Hide My Email address to a separate inbox”.

I think that’s orthogonal to using Hide My Email, though. If you want that, you likely would do the same for mail from the site’s domain.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#333

Post by mingus88 »

gnoll_of_gozag wrote: post #312
al_borland wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

strange. i've used disposable emails for reddit accounts several times and everything worked

Last couple of accounts I created with proton accounts were immediately shadow banned

I could post but my posts were not visible to anyone else

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#334

Post by lunatuna »

allthetime wrote: post #294
wpm wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have iCloud Keychain enabled you don't have to "remember" a sign-in at all. Flip a toggle, say "Yes" when Safari offers to remember the new password you generated for the fake email you generated in a drop down menu, and you're a FaceID/TouchID away from auth. My 80 year old uncle can manage this. I have been a happy Hide My Email user for years. This is simply not a problem, and even for normies it's no more…

It’s a problem if you use non-Apple devices as well as Apple devices.

It isn’t that straight forward but I use Firefox on Linux along with my iPhone and Mac. My workflow is to use Passwords and Hide my on safari and then Firefox there after on the Apple device. Firefox then saves the login details and it shows up on my Linux + Firefox desktop. Not ideal, kinda dumb, and takes away a little bit of faith in humanity, but I don’t have to type in the details.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#336

Post by drnick1 »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #284
drnick1 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain. Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.

WHOIS isn't a factor here. If an attacker knows or deduces that you're the only individual receiving mail at *@yourdomain.example [1], they can track you across different databases by just looking for your domain name. The privacy preserving aspect of hide-my-email services is the fact that they have thousands of users using the same domain name. [1]: This is trivial if you have a service's email database leak. You j…

> If an attacker knows or deduces that you're the only individual receiving mail at *@yourdomain.example [1], they can track you across different databases by just looking for your domain name.

How would that attacker gain access to such databases? Let's say HN is compromised and my email here, say hn@mydomain.com, is leaked. How does that help you track me elsewhere? If I start receiving spam at hn@mydomain.com because of the leak, I will simply revoke the alias and the spam will bounce.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#337

Post by nielsbot »

SXX wrote: post #79
nielsbot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send from Hide My Email addresses: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/use-hide-my-email-in-... I think I've also seen this in Mail.app but that's not shown on this page.

Wow my bad I wasnt aware its possible. I remember someone in HN comments complaining about it being one way only back in 2024. UPD: apperently this supposedly only work if someone message you first. So you still cant spam from aliases.

Ok thanks. Directions are misleading then.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#338

Post by port11 »

jawiggins wrote: post #8

> If you use iCloud+ and Hide My Email, there is still time to generate more aliases on @icloud.com as the change has not yet landed and the rate limit for creating aliases is at least 30 per hour. Part of the reason to use Hide My Email was that it made keeping myself private hassle-free. Making a system to pre-generate values and then catalog them for later use is quite the hassle.

I pay for the bundle, but HME was never hassle-free. I would say that it works on ~40% of form fields. Most of the time I never get the prompt from HME.

It’s also might obnoxious if you ever need to remove an email from that list (or, gods forbid, mass clean the list).

But okay, this update is even worse. I might just stop paying for the iCloud+ whatchamacallit and backup to my Mac like I used to.

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#339

Post by port11 »

wartijn_ wrote: post #86
LordDragonfang wrote: post #77

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.

I know a few. Heck, I’ve worked at such a place, we strictly checked MX records to make sure the email would be reachable, and catch-alls usually wouldn’t pass validation.

(I’m not saying we should have been doing that, but the company was in insurance and wanted to be extra extra sure.)

Re: Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

#340

Post by jonotime »

404mm wrote: post #326
jonotime wrote: post #82

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.

This lacks the easy control over blocking the “aliases” you’re done with. The real pro tip is to use this domain with something like addy.io (paid or self-hosted) where you can either pre-create the aliases or have them dynamically created for you as they become used for the first time - and having control over each of them so you can block it when you want.

I have never had to do this in my years of using this scheme. And if I did, I would create an email filter. Which I consider to be more standard and scalable then managing a bunch of individual aliases.
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