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.

Totally agree with unique at own domain isn&#x27;t actually privacy. It wouldn&#x27;t take much of a paper trail to work out the details.I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we&#x27;ve had some previous relationship but it&#x27;s sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they&#x27;ve just scraped my contact details and it&#x27;s spam- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don&#x27;t expect it&#x27;s easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)- 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.

Mailinator was an awesome service when it first worked. Thank you!!!

The reason it&#x27;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.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.

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.

&gt; This is a huge selling point.Same thoughts. I&#x27;m annoyed with the number of services that blocks alias domains.At least I don&#x27;t see services attempting to block @icloud.com domains.

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.

Seriously, Apple is &quot;big tech,&quot; but they are the only one that appears to give a crap about privacy at all. And really, they put a lot of money and effort into it.We need to give kudos when they are due.Apple&#x27;s Private Cloud Compute should have won some kind of Nobel Privacy Prize, which for some reason does not yet exist.

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

I think the other answers are misinterpreting your question. A user is held &quot;hostage&quot; because unlike fastmail where the format is word.salad@yourdomain; if you ever wanted to ditch iCloud completely, you&#x27;d have to go through every single account you used it for and update the email. As someone who has shed his gmail account I can tell you it&#x27;s not easy to update email address on every site you&#x27;ve ever used it on. The issue people are raising is that apple doesn&#x27;t let you use your own domain, and generate random emails at that domain. Not my complaint, but I can see the perspective.

Marketing turds can&#x27;t just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.

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

Using icloud.com domain for legit and hidden adresses is such a typical Apple strategy of holding their own users and &quot;others&quot; (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 &quot;Sign in with Apple&quot; on a blog without paying $99&#x2F;yr for a developer license.

I&#x27;m glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to

I suspect many people actually feel better about Apple owning this fuckup and reversing it than they would have Apple hadn&#x27;t fucked up in the first place.

For the &quot;hide my email&quot; feature, Apple currently and has always used &quot;@icloud.com&quot;. 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 &quot;Hide my email&quot; users based on the email.They have now reverted their plans to change this, meaning &quot;hide my email&quot; is still &quot;@icloud.com&quot;.

Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I&#x27;m reading some of the comments here and I feel like I&#x27;m missing something here.

Best thing to do with Gmail spam is to make an auto filter to mark all spam as not spam.Took me only one missed dentist appointment several years ago to get that idea. Now I&#x27;m just getting profits. No other spam since I&#x27;m using email aliases.

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&#x2F;green texts.

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.

Maybe it&#x27;s because I live in a country where e-mai isn&#x27;t really used that much for personal communication, but wouldn&#x27;t this mainly be a gmail issue? If mails I wanted ended up in the spam folder I&#x27;d not use gmail. I mean, I pay for protonmail, so I wouldn&#x27;t use gmail to begin with, but if mails I wanted ended up in my protonmail spamfolder and I couldn&#x27;t do anything about it, then I&#x27;d switch away from protonmail.

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

Apple had been on a steady path of bad decisions since a few years, I&#x27;m glad to see they reverted at least on this one.Now if they could completely remove liquid glass...

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.

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 &quot;opt in&quot; to this, but are forced by apple to use SIWA if they&#x27;re using any other provider.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;app-store&#x2F;review&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;#sign-in-with-apple" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;app-store&#x2F;review&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;#sig...</a>

Not arbitrarily many aliases - there&#x27;s a limit of (as of two or three weeks ago) 768.

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.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.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.The latter is very much not filterable.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” service, which lets you make arbitrarily many @icloud.com private aliases to forward to your real address. Critically, the latter toplevel Hide My Email feature works with sites that don’t use Sign In With Apple. It’s just stupidly unfortunate that Apple calls both of these features “hide my email.”

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.

It won&#x27;t. The news here is that it won&#x27;t.

it will still be on &quot;private.icloud.com&quot;. Just as filterable...

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.

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

It&#x27;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.

Maybe hidemyemail allows easily creating many accounts on a site. And some big site didn&#x27;t like it.The &quot;Sign-up via Apple&quot; button and creating an iCloud email yourself have a slightly higher barrier than creating a new throwaway hidemyemail email (1 API call w&#x2F;o captcha&#x2F;phone verification or whatever).We might find out later this year if some site starts blocking @icloud.com but keeps allowing @private.icloud.com.

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 &quot;uh, are we really doing this?&quot; or was there a story here that anyone knows about?

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&#x27;s chilling because Apple has so lost their way that they can&#x27;t figure out these obviously stupid directions internally before making a fool of themselves to the public (and I agree with that take).

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

I&#x27;ve noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.

It&#x27;s talking about two different services:&gt; Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.&gt; iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

Sign in with Apple is Apple&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t understand how this changes anything. IIRC, the complaints were about Apple making the Hide My Email addresses different than regular ones.They&#x27;re now saying the new domain will be private.icloud.com. Isn&#x27;t it just as targetable?

You have the developer app installed. It does seem to be deep linking wrong.Sign in with Apple email addresses are email addresses for the Sign in with Apple button.

this opens some crazy &quot;apple developer&quot; 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&#x27;m glad my hide my email addresses won&#x27;t change because that would be a PITA.

A lot of places also don&#x27;t really like icloud addresses in general. This is one of Apple&#x27;s better offerings though.

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

That&#x27;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:&gt; After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

I think the post is very explicit. First sentence:&gt; 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.

How many sign ups you have with an @icloud.com address?A lot of those are Hide My Email aliases that, by design, you can’t tell apart from real human addresses.

I&#x27;m a bit confused - when i see these signups, they look like this to me:rtwnj6tj7@privaterelay.appleid.com

Good. This would have made blocking them trivial.

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

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

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