Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

create a burner for when ‘not always applicable unfortunately’

As of about six months ago, AT&T's web site would not accept email addresses without a three-character TLD. I had to get a customer service person on the phone to manually change my address.

Nothing of it solves privacy though.

It's not a fake e-mail, it's a legitimate e-mail that you can send e-mail to and the user will receive, which has to be created by a paying iCloud user and not an anonymous rando off the internet.

I'd be interested to know what downsides, if any, you see for a website to accept a private e-mail address like this. Do you have a legitimate complaint about these sorts of e-mails? Again, given that private relay isn't an 'anonymous e-mail service' (it's still tied to your iCloud account so spam, etc. shouldn't be any more of an issue) but merely an 'anonymous to the person you're giving the e-mail to' service.

If your actual complaint is 'if you insist on giving me an e-mail that you can revoke unilaterally making me unable to contact you against your wishes, and which cannot be associated with other user data from other sources to build a profile of you, then you're not worth having as a customer' then that's a separate complaint - and one that means I want nothing to do with your website.

When an organization invariably leaks my email and I start receiving spam to it, I generate a new one, update my email on record, deactivate the old one, and the spam stops.

Its a real address that I can use to monitor your behavior, since businesses send so much damn spam.

Been using them for 25 years, not gonna stop any time soon.

What you’d lose is the reply-to forwarding feature.

This allows Apple to see which sets of users share unique Winnie the Pooh memes. They know who had them first, who they sent them to, and when.

The E2EE is useless with such unencrypted metadata leaks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg

If you are worried about privacy, get a domain just for this. Use domain privacy and dont host other things there.

Yes, some sites whitelist domains or dont allow subdomains. For those I'll use another account - or a firefox alias or something. But 9 out of 10 work fine.

I am not a fan of alias services since materializing names takes discipline. How many do you make? Maybe there is a limit of 50. When do you share them across services? My guess is many people just create 2 or 3 aliases they use for everything - which defeats the purpose. Sure, it masks your personal address, but once one gets compromised, you find it basically served as your personal address anyway.

I also dont really keep track of most of the names I use. Since most are one time things that I would never use again, like to sign a waiver or something. But I mostly stick to '{domain}@' for the names. So my nytimes account would just be nytimes@, which is predictable when I need to recover it. I used to use addy.io for this, but it was not as good since it had account limits and I had to manually manage every alias. Much easier for me to just create a mail filter to sinkhole an old name. Of course I have never really needed to do this anyway.

However be warned some surprisingly large websites don't support subdomains, for example eBay will silently send user@sub.domain.tld to user@domain.tld and you'll only figure it out by looking at your server logs for rejected mail.

In those cases I have to specifically alias that username@domain.tld to the subdomain.

With this new Apple privacy subdomain maybe eBay will finally fix this.

Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.

It's a non-issue. I've been using a catch all domain for at least a decade. I get a small amount of spam to random made up emails but not enough to care about plus it all gets caught and filtered.

So, it's a piece of cake to add "{random}@example.com" to the block list. Usually it's something like "msg-bestbuy@example.com".

I had one small business aggressively threaten me that they fully owned their business name and I wasn't allowed to use it in my email address.

My solution was to keep my wonderful aliases and dump them. If a business is concerned but nice about it I'll offer an alternative such as plumber@

> The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).

If you have your own domain most mail providers don't care what username@ you use on your sent mail so you shouldn't need any additional mailboxes (especially if they already offer inbound catch all)

I also use the ReplayAsOriginalRecipientUp [1] extension in Thunderbird which takes the recipient address and puts it as the sender for ongoing communication.

[1]: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/reply...

I was once on the phone with german insurance provider and they dictateted me email to send documents to: kundenbetreuung@passportcard.de

I dont speak German so it was both tough and funny EuroTrip-like moment.

Yes its really email they use.

But to the point of forward-in-only -- I use the fastmail web client and iOS client. Both of these respond using the Masked Email address if you choose to respond to an email. In fact I can choose any of my masked email addressed as I am composing mail to initial communication from that address.

In short, "it just works". I really can't say enough good things about Fastmail!

I've been in the ecosystem long enough to have .iCloud.com, .me, .mobileme.com, iTunes.com, and probably one or two more addresses all assigned by various Apple services over the years before they started unifying the systems.

They all work, and independently of one another.

I wonder if all the domains will be migrated, and how namespace collisions will be handled.

While this is true not all of them been weird. Some can be just word + number + word without dots or underscores.

Also blanket banning whole domains is just much easier and already done for temporary emails. No false positives.

I use this wonderful extension to make it easy to generate aliases https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...

I sure wish 1Password + Fastmail would let you generate them within the 1Password app without requiring a browser sign-up page in the middle.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/apple-plans-to-change-its-...