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.<p>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.<p>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.
Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.<p>I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:<p>- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam<p>- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)<p>- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.
> - similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)<p>This is exactly why I do it, it's eye opening to see exactly which companies leaked your address. As a result of being able to blackhole the leaked addresses I no longer get any spam, the Dvorak dream.<p>I actually caught a company outright selling my address to AWS of all places, I didn't even know Amazon purchased mailing lists.<p>AWS were crafty because they didn't directly sell a service, they only offered "resources" for "business leaders" because they knew nothing about what I might need.<p><i>Explore the AWS [REDACTED] where business leaders can access eBooks, guides, and customer stories to find practical advice on building or improving upon a data strategy. Learn how you can leverage data as a strategic asset, make better decisions with insights from data, and innovate faster.</i>
I agree with all of this. I’d add that it’s useful for sorting and searching. Things like keyword matching, from address, and from domain aren’t as consistent as you’d hope, but companies do need to actually email the address they were given, so you can use it to reliably identify emails from them.
But all 3 of those use cases, plus privacy, can be addressed with word.salad@bigdomain.com. So you may as well get the privacy bit in there.
True, but it requires setting up a mailbox at bigdomain.com for every use case. With your own domain you can just setup a catchall mainbox like catchemall@yourdomain.com and don’t even need to remember any mailbox@bigdomain.com name. Just use github@ and it will be automatically be catched by your catchall.
I configured about a dozen domains to have MX records for the mailinator disposable inbox service for about a decade for free as a gift and the domains were toxic for any other email use case for years afterwards… they were so abused you couldn’t even sign up for most web services with any email associated by the time I stopped renewing them… there are still GitHub lists of disposable email addresses that list to blacklist those domains (and many other), so, I agree. If the big providers don’t offer disposable email addresses there is no good option.
So assuming that I wanted a domain, which would be worthless on any mailing listing and pretty much any service, only good for regular emails, then letting them sit a mailinator aliases for a year or so is a good option?<p>Sadly mailinator and similar services aren't really working anymore.
Mailinator was an awesome service when it first worked. Thank you!!!
The reason it's toxic is because the Venn diagram between disposable email addresses and email addresses used for CSAM is a circle: If you accept disposable email and allow users to upload anything, you will have CSAM.<p>Whereas a Fastmail masked email or iCloud relay is still in the backend tied to your real account and identity which means it provides privacy generally for you but is traceable enough that it is unappealing for predators.
Yep I have a few @firefox.com addresses from the inital launch of Firefox Relay. Come in handy for some of the more stubborn sites that block private addresses.
> <i>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.</i><p>You assume that the domain is used by one person or what?<p>Also, the point of these is typically to prevent spam. Noone is going to spend a fraction of a cent or second to try and figure out who is behind the adress.
Indeed, Proton’s passmail are sometimes not accepted sadly.
> This is a huge selling point.<p>Same thoughts. I'm annoyed with the number of services that blocks alias domains.<p>At least I don't see services attempting to block @icloud.com domains.
Using icloud.com domain for legit and hidden adresses is such a typical Apple strategy of holding their own users <i>and</i> "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.
I wish I could set up "Sign in with Apple" on a blog without paying $99/yr for a developer license.
I'm glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to
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.<p>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.
Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I'm reading some of the comments here and I feel like I'm missing something here.
For the "hide my email" feature, Apple currently and has always used "@icloud.com". This masks you amongst all iCloud users.<p>They were planning to change it to a custom domain, which would allow sites to easily filter out and reject "Hide my email" users based on the email.<p>They have now reverted their plans to change this, meaning "hide my email" is still "@icloud.com".
I suspect many people actually feel better about Apple owning this fuckup and reversing it than they would have Apple hadn't fucked up in the first place.
Except the post says it will be @private.icloud.com<p>Whereas people's Apple emails are often at @icloud.com<p>So I don't think it masks you amongst all iCloud users. I'm confused how this is much better!
Oh I glad there is still someone at Apple who understood its insanity. If only they made it generate a bit more sensible alias names.<p>UPD: I obviously mean alias addresses template make most of them too easy to recognize.
Can't the aliases be renamed?<p>---<p>Just checked, they can. Phew. If the forwarding alias was detectable/always used the same schema, that'd also make them borderline useless, just like the `privaterelay` subdomain
What do you mean renamed? Alias address certainly are not changeable. You can randomize next one from 2-3 options, but most of them still follow pattern that is easy to recognize.<p>PS: I guess its just misunderstsnding and I really meant addresses themself are not human-like enough.
But the private relay domain is only used when you sign up through “Sign in with Apple”? A thing you have to support if your iOS app already supports sign up with other third party authentication providers.
One of the best things about it. Also being able to add several emails per custom domain for free.<p>Whole thing is 99c a month. Makes Gmail seem like a joke in comparison.<p>Until you get an email from an iCloud address on Gmail and see it go right to spam haha. Suddenly Gmail is cheap again
Best thing to do with Gmail spam is to make an auto filter to mark all spam as not spam.<p>Took me only one missed dentist appointment several years ago to get that idea. Now I'm just getting profits. No other spam since I'm using email aliases.
Maybe it's because I live in a country where e-mai isn't really used that much for personal communication, but wouldn't this mainly be a gmail issue? If mails I wanted ended up in the spam folder I'd not use gmail. I mean, I pay for protonmail, so I wouldn't use gmail to begin with, but if mails I wanted ended up in my protonmail spamfolder and I couldn't do anything about it, then I'd switch away from protonmail.
If you’re talking about people with the technical sophistication to consider software services based on their technical merits, then sure. Your average user couldn’t even tell you the first thing about which non-content-based criteria might inform a spam score… or have even heard of a spam score. So they will absolutely not blame Gmail if another provider’s email gets spam flagged… they’d probably just think “why don’t they just get a Gmail account,” à la iMessage users/green texts.
You are 100% correct and yet the masses still prefer it.<p>World’s a twisted place!<p>I would guess the average Gmail user doesn’t know that it reports virtually all iCloud as Spam - believing instead that it’s genuinely being filtered by quality engineering at Google.
If you pay for iCloud + a domain, you can have ${anything}@${yourdomain}. Works like a charm.<p>For example, I can have hn@mydomain.com for hn only mails, if they share my mail address, I'll know.
iCloud Hide My Email sharing the same domain with normal email (icloud.com) is the reason why I use iCloud over other email alias services like simplelogin and addy.
As I user of this service I like this.<p>However filtering for these hide my e-mail addresses is quite easy if you are motivated to do it, they have a recognizable pattern.
it will still be on "private.icloud.com". Just as filterable...
private.icloud.com (née privaterelay.appleid.com) is the address for “Sign In With Apple”, which is an oauth-style service that sites opt into to let you use your Apple ID to sign in. Sites offering this as a signup option are already aware it gives users an option to use a private anonymized email address.<p>The toplevel “Hide My Email” iCloud feature is a different thing, can be done independently of a SIWA flow (you can just go into settings and make more addresses, all it needs is a name and a notes field) and uses @icloud.com in order to make your anonymized email address look indistinguishable from other iCloud users.<p>The former is “filterable”, yes, but it’s moot because you only get those if you offer Sign In With Apple in the first place, and if you want real emails, you would already know to just… not do that.<p>The latter is very much not filterable.<p>The confusing thing though, is that when a user uses Sign In With Apple, they are offered two options: “share my email” which gives the site your real address, and “hide my email” which gives an @private.appleid.com address. But this “hide my email” option is a totally different thing from the separate “hide my email” <i>service</i>, which lets you make arbitrarily many @icloud.com private aliases to forward to your real address. Critically, the latter <i>toplevel</i> Hide My Email feature works with sites that <i>don’t</i> use Sign In With Apple. It’s just stupidly unfortunate that Apple calls both of these features “hide my email.”
Agree with the comment largely; though: Apple does have a policy where apps need to use SIWA if other oauth providers are present (Google) [0]. So sites do "opt in" to this, but are forced by apple to use SIWA if they're using any other provider.<p>[0]: <a href="https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sign-in-with-apple" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...</a>
Not arbitrarily many aliases - there's a limit of (as of two or three weeks ago) 768.
It won't. The news here is that it won't.
Others have addressed the validity of your comment, but I’d like to discuss another aspect. Even if it is filter, I think most people would not want to filter. Apple makes it very easy to use private relay and many people that buy Apple products do use private relay. Even if you know, it’s a private relay email address, surely you want a user who buys expensive technology products to use your website in almost all circumstances.
I've noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.
My guess is Ternus is starting to take more and more control. Tim was pretty absent and phoning it in the past few years.
Anyone have a theory why this even made it to this point? the switch was such obviously a bad idea. just corporate weirdness that no one there bothered to raise their hand and be like "uh, are we really doing this?" or was there a story here that anyone knows about?
It's email reputation, it the always the answer with this kind of stuff.<p>My guess is that the bounce rate got too high and bot farms were using iCloud addresses like this.
The bounce rate of what, exactly?<p>Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design.<p>Whenever I start getting spam at an address that's been leaked, I deactivate it. I've done the same with my oldest gmail account, but the work required there is notably higher.
If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues.<p>Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private one. So it’s not like they were “camouflaged.“<p>It’s a little odd they’re switching the subdomain though.
> If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay.<p>I couldn't. "Uses Apple products" is one of the more reliable signals of willingness and ability to spend money on stuff online.
Hide My Email <i>already</i> uses plain old @iCloud.com as the domain.<p>They are not changing the subdomain. There isn’t one. The announcement is they are leaving it as-is.<p>The email addresses for sign-in with Apple do use the @private.iCloud.com subdomain, but again, that’s not a change.
Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. There’s no easy-to-check pattern.<p>They’re not switching the subdomain. They’re keeping it the same. That’s the news.<p>They’re switching the subdomain for the “Sign in with Apple” sign ups, which is not the same service.
> Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model.<p>why would random selection from sets of predefined strings and joining them using a "." need any LLM involvement? Oh you need to check if it already taken... maybe for that? I'd use a database though...<p>These days some people would even generate GUIDs with some language model, I guess...
It’s probably not an LLM, nor a small transformer-based model, but it is a language model. Probably the kind that powered auto-correct before GPT.<p>The generated words agree in grammatical gender and plural forms, so by definition it’s a language model.
Right, but I'm asking "what bounce issues?"<p>Like for my usage there are no bounce issues with the ~400 legitimate providers that I have Hide My Email addresses from. The only ones with bounce issues are the spammers who've acquired leaked addresses that I've deactivated.
If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penalize senders the way, say, Google would if they see you sending a ton of email to their domains and they all bounce -- but people tend to use services to help send email and centrally pool their reputation (such as mailchimp) and so these services themselves then watch the bounce rate of their individual customers and either charge them more or ban their access due to the bounce rate increase.
Is Apple really stupid enough that they BOUNCE emails after you deactivate, rather than just silent discard? What's the point of bouncing unwanted emails these days? It's not like these bounces go to humans who go "Oh, gee! This address must not work. Allow me to go and figure out how to contact him!" It's just a stream of full-on spam with completely fake return addresses, and crap from email campaign software.
Whoever operates the smtp servers for icloud.com complained loudly enough that their job was too hard because of all the traffic, but not loudly enough for someone smart enough to hear about it, until it was announced to the public.
Maybe hidemyemail allows easily creating many accounts on a site. And some big site didn't like it.<p>The "Sign-up via Apple" button and creating an iCloud email yourself have a slightly higher barrier than creating a new throwaway hidemyemail email (1 API call w/o captcha/phone verification or whatever).<p>We might find out later this year if some site starts blocking @icloud.com but keeps allowing @private.icloud.com.
Hmm it’s almost as if people are paying good money for iCloud+ or something. They aren’t google and shouldn’t be retiring their services as if they’re giving them away for free
While I applaud this specific change, Apple has been known to stick to their guns and I used to believe they were almost always in the right for doing so because it led to <i>better</i> outcomes. So my take is that it's chilling because Apple has so lost their way that they can't figure out these obviously stupid directions internally before making a fool of themselves to the public (and I agree with that take).
Apple had been on a steady path of bad decisions since a few years, I'm glad to see they reverted at least on this one.<p>Now if they could completely remove liquid glass...
I wonder if the initial reason to move them to a separate domain, was because they started to see providers blackholing icloud.com anyway, thus also hurting non-aliased emails?<p>If so, will be interesting to see if that will get worse.
Good. This would have made blocking them trivial.
Good. What else can really be said? Only way for it to work and not be trivially blocked is to mix with legit emails.
I'm a bit confused - when i see these signups, they look like this to me:<p>rtwnj6tj7@privaterelay.appleid.com
I think the post is very explicit. First sentence:<p>> Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.
That's the Sign in with Apple domain, not the Hide My Email domain. HME is remaining at icloud.com instead of moving to private.icloud.com as well. From the linked article:<p>> After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.
How many sign ups you have with an @icloud.com address?<p>A lot of those are Hide My Email aliases that, by design, you can’t tell apart from real human addresses.
I don't understand how this changes anything. IIRC, the complaints were about Apple making the Hide My Email addresses different than regular ones.<p>They're now saying the new domain will be private.icloud.com. Isn't it just as targetable?
It's talking about two different services:<p>> Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.<p>> iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.
Sign in with Apple is Apple's SSO, like Sign in with Google. Services have to support this one explicitly, <i>and</i> it already had a special subdomain, so the specific subdomain is simply changing.<p>Hide My Email is the manually generated ones, for websites that accept an arbitrary email address. This is the one where it's valuable for the relays to be identical to genuine iCloud addresses, otherwise websites could try to block it and force you to use a more revealing email address, undermining privacy.
It is reassuring to see Apple maintaining this domain consistency. Changing it would have broken a lot of automated routing rules for those of us relying on it for privacy.
this opens some crazy "apple developer" dialog on my mac rather than a web page. I had to crank up chrome to read it. And it makes no sense, I have no clue what a sign on with apple address is. I guess I'm glad my hide my email addresses won't change because that would be a PITA.
Now if they would only figure out how to Hide My Phone Number then these feature would actually impact privacy.
Good. Thank you for listening, iCloud team.
Good! Was there ever a compelling reason why they went for this switch initially?
That was a stupid idea (the prev one)
[dead]
thank god -.-