Apple Reverses Course: iCloud+ Hide My Email Stays on icloud.com
iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com
Apple has updated its Sign in with Apple plans after community feedback. New private relay addresses will move to private.icloud.com later this year, but iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com. Developers must update their systems to accept the new domain while keeping support for the existing privaterelay.appleid.com.
After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.
- kqp
This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail.
Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who feels like it can trivially automatically detect that those are all you.
Personally I use unique at own domain only where I’m identifying myself anyway, like my bank, and Fastmail masked email where I’m not. For most things it’s not actually that terrible to accept a small risk that they’re offline for a day between your being booted without warning and you changing your email address with them.
- hollow-moe
Using icloud.com domain for legit and hidden adresses is such a typical Apple strategy of holding their own users and "others" (ie. other web services, other users etc) hostage simultaneously. But at least here it is actually a good reason that works for the user.
- bni
As I user of this service I like this.
However filtering for these hide my e-mail addresses is quite easy if you are motivated to do it, they have a recognizable pattern.
- philip1209
I wish I could set up "Sign in with Apple" on a blog without paying $99/yr for a developer license.
- joshuat
I'm glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to
- giwook
Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I'm reading some of the comments here and I feel like I'm missing something here.
- NotThatFast
One of the best things about it. Also being able to add several emails per custom domain for free.
Whole thing is 99c a month. Makes Gmail seem like a joke in comparison.
Until you get an email from an iCloud address on Gmail and see it go right to spam haha. Suddenly Gmail is cheap again
- DarmokTanagra
I use hide my email and single use credit card numbers all the time, its a fantastic system combined with some basic email forwarding rules.
Yes, vendor lock in sucks, but I have $20k worth of apple hardware already so that ship has sailed and overall Im pretty happy with it.