iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

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KK7PJP about 3 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on developer.apple.com

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Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

philip1209•13 minutes ago

I wish I could set up "Sign in with Apple" on a blog without paying $99/yr for a developer license.

hollow-moe•about 2 hours ago

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.

HeavenFox•11 minutes ago

Case in point: many websites block all VPN except iCloud Private Relay. Thank you Apple!

dilyevsky•35 minutes ago

how is the user being held hostage? you can redirect hide my email addresses to any domain

travoc•30 minutes ago

Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.

joshuat•about 3 hours ago

I'm glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to

giwook•42 minutes ago

Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I'm reading some of the comments here and I feel like I'm missing something here.

dannyw•37 minutes ago

For the "hide my email" feature, Apple currently and has always used "@icloud.com". This masks you amongst all iCloud users.

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.

They have now reverted their plans to change this, meaning "hide my email" is still "@icloud.com".

NotThatFast•about 2 hours ago

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

Quothling•about 2 hours ago

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.

NotThatFast•about 2 hours ago

You are 100% correct and yet the masses still prefer it.

World’s a twisted place!

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.

xaviervn•about 2 hours ago

I don't understand how this changes anything. IIRC, the complaints were about Apple making the Hide My Email addresses different than regular ones.

They're now saying the new domain will be private.icloud.com. Isn't it just as targetable?

NobodyNada•about 2 hours ago

It's talking about two different services:

> Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.

> iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

LoganDark•about 2 hours ago

Sign in with Apple is Apple's SSO, like Sign in with Google. Services have to support this one explicitly, and it already had a special subdomain, so the specific subdomain is simply changing.

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.

postalcoder•about 3 hours ago

I've noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.

VCFundedGenYer•about 1 hour ago

My guess is Ternus is starting to take more and more control. Tim was pretty absent and phoning it in the past few years.

cush•about 1 hour ago

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

herpdyderp•26 minutes ago

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 better 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).

nate•about 2 hours ago

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?

jofzar•about 2 hours ago

It's email reputation, it the always the answer with this kind of stuff.

My guess is that the bounce rate got too high and bot farms were using iCloud addresses like this.

Marsymars•about 2 hours ago

The bounce rate of what, exactly?

Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design.

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.

super256•about 2 hours ago

Maybe hidemyemail allows easily creating many accounts on a site. And some big site didn't like it.

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).

We might find out later this year if some site starts blocking @icloud.com but keeps allowing @private.icloud.com.

pests•about 2 hours ago

It does, and I know a friend of a friend who uses them for Walmart accounts to bot pokemon drops. Those and office aliases.

amazingamazing•about 3 hours ago

Good. What else can really be said? Only way for it to work and not be trivially blocked is to mix with legit emails.

jambalaya8•about 2 hours ago

A lot of places also don't really like icloud addresses in general. This is one of Apple's better offerings though.

floam•about 3 hours ago

Good. This would have made blocking them trivial.

prism56•about 3 hours ago

Good! Was there ever a compelling reason why they went for this switch initially?

floam•about 3 hours ago

Yes, to fully fix a certain class of bug on their infra.

culi•about 2 hours ago

Do you know any more about it or have a link where I can read more?

floam•about 2 hours ago

I’ll try to add more later, but it is believed that multiple times, a bug in some random API has allowed for the “hidden” Apple account to be revealed because they resolve hide my emails to the original internally. Using a separate namespace would be the universal fix.

A mitigation for the cause of https://www.404media.co/apple-hide-my-email-vulnerability-re...

gruez•about 2 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559935

If you dig more you could find the bug, but AFAIK it was that if you sent a large attachment, the bounce email would contain your real address.

delduca•about 3 hours ago

That was a stupid idea (the prev one)

trueno•about 2 hours ago

thank god -.-