Apple Is Reducing the Effectiveness of the ‘Hide My Email’ Feature, but There Are Alternatives.
I use Apple’s ” Hide My Email ” feature almost every time an app asks me for my email address. I almost never share my real email address unless I truly trust the company or service requesting it, or I know it will make my life easier in the long run. (If you’ve ever tried to confirm the alias you specified in “Hide My Email” with a customer service representative, you know what I mean.)
Unfortunately, it appears Apple plans to reduce the effectiveness of the “Hide My Email” feature, which will increase the likelihood that I’ll share my real email address the next time I sign up for the service. Fortunately, even if Apple degrades the “Hide My Email” feature, there are alternatives worth considering.
What is “Hide My Email”?
If you’re unfamiliar with this privacy tool, here’s how it works: if you have an iCloud+ subscription, Hide My Email creates email “aliases” that forward messages to your real email address. You can use these aliases anywhere you normally use your real email, maintaining some anonymity without sacrificing the convenience of a single inbox.
Let’s say you’re signing up for a new website. Instead of providing your real email address, you can use the “Hide My Email” feature to generate a unique, random address—something like ” [email protected] ” (seriously, they really do look like that). As silly as these aliases may seem, they’re invaluable for maintaining your privacy: any messages sent to these aliases will be forwarded to your real inbox. You’ll receive the email as if it were sent to your real address, without actually revealing your email address to the contact. What’s more, if this alias is hacked, you can disable it without affecting your real email address. Win-win.
How Apple is making the ‘Hide My Email’ feature worse
This system has been working flawlessly for years. So, naturally, Apple is planning to make things even worse. As TechCrunch reports , the company is preparing to merge the “Hide My Email” alias domains with the “Sign in with Apple” domains. If you’ve ever used “Sign in with Apple”—the feature that lets you sign up for services using your Apple account—you may know that it generates privaterelay.appleid.com domains for your account address. Going forward, both “Sign in with Apple” and “Hide My Email” will use private.icloud.com domains. In the example above, your email alias will be ” [email protected] ” instead of ” [email protected] “.
From Apple’s perspective, this simplifies things by keeping both private login features tied to a single domain. But for everyone else, it slightly disrupts the Hide My Email feature. The existing setup ensures that your Hide My Email alias is indistinguishable from your standard iCloud email address. While a person might see [email protected] and realize something is amiss, the system only knows that the email address is a valid @icloud.com address. Thus, it treats the alias like any other iCloud email address and lets you through. However, the new domain signals to anyone (or any system) that your email address is actually an alias. Companies could potentially block @private.icloud.com domain registrations from receiving services, completely defeating the purpose of Hide My Email.
Apple states that existing Hide My Email domains will continue to function as usual, so your old aliases will remain intact. However, once the changes take effect, new aliases risk becoming inoperable. I’d be reluctant to continue using this feature unless most companies and services started treating @private.icloud.com addresses differently than regular domains. But if blocking these Hide My Email aliases becomes commonplace, that will change things.
Alternatives to email aliases that you can use instead.
If these changes do affect the effectiveness of the “Hide My Email” feature, don’t worry: there are alternatives you can try. For example, Proton Mail has its own version of this feature, and while unlimited aliases require a paid subscription, you can generate 10 for free. DuckDuckGo also has its own version , called Email Protection, which generates aliases using the @duck.com domain. Mozilla offers an option in Firefox Relay that also works with phone numbers; if you want to completely hide your contact information from companies and services, this may be a better option.