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jawiggins 4 hours ago [-]
> If you use iCloud+ and Hide My Email, there is still time to generate more aliases on @icloud.com as the change has not yet landed and the rate limit for creating aliases is at least 30 per hour.
Part of the reason to use Hide My Email was that it made keeping myself private hassle-free. Making a system to pre-generate values and then catalog them for later use is quite the hassle.
c7b 3 hours ago [-]
If you don't mind trusting another company with forwarding your emails, it's definitely less hassle to set up an equivalent service for yourself.
treesknees 22 minutes ago [-]
You can sort of do this today with iCloud. Add a custom domain and enable the catch-all forwarding, and you can receive anything@domain.tld and it’s forwarded to you.
What you’d lose is the reply-to forwarding feature.
LordDragonfang 3 hours ago [-]
If you mean "set up an equivalent service" under your own domain, that's both less private and more likely to be blocked; there are a lot of services which, unfortunately, only allow sign-ups from big, well-known domains.
wartijn_ 3 hours ago [-]
Are there really? I don't think I've ever encountered such a service in all the years I've been using an email address under my own domain.
And blocking every email address that's not from a big provider means blocking basically everyone who tries to sign up with their company email, which might not be great for business.
vitally3643 1 hours ago [-]
I've been running my own mailserver on a firstnamelastname.com domain for nearly 15 years.
As far as I can tell, nobody blocks it. Google sometimes rejects emails where the from address doesn't match the real sending address, which is fair.
I guess the first couple of years were rocky, I hadn't figured out DKIM and SPF and all the other blood rituals yet. Back then I got blocked by Steam and banks. But ever since I set up the correct security it's been fine. Been my primary email for a long long time. All my online accounts are tied to it.
Incidentally, I also have free and unlimited aliases. But I don't usually bother because I have a rule to route all messages to unknown addresses into a special folder. I can give out any random address at my domain and it will always make it back to me. So much more convenient than logging into the website to generate an alias.
bb88 50 minutes ago [-]
I did that too years ago, but the management of it was kind of annoying. DKIM was just getting introduced when I stopped using it. SPF had controversy. I understand both of those are awesome now.
The biggest issue was if your ip address got listed in a RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), and then nobody would talk to you. Some were easy to get off, others were permanent blocks, and I found those to be constantly interfering with the delivery of mail. At least the rejection would usually tell you which RBL blocked you.
kay_o 1 hours ago [-]
in asia it is frequent that email domain is a dropdown not a type in
gerdesj 1 hours ago [-]
Asia is huge. Please be more explicit (if you can).
dadadad100 2 hours ago [-]
Camel camel camel wouldn’t send notifications to my hidden email. Works fine for my regular vanity domain.
xigoi 2 hours ago [-]
I recently tried signing up for DeepSeek using my custom-domain e-mail address and the website said the domain is “not supported”.
lukeify 2 hours ago [-]
Within the last month both Mapbox and Etsy blocked my attempts to signup using a Proton Mail alias. How many services do you sign up for in recent years, on average? The practice is becoming incredibly common and more than likely you're just grandfathered in.
jbxntuehineoh 2 hours ago [-]
are you sure they're not just blacklisting protonmail vs. whitelisting known providers? ime a lot of sites block "temporary" or "anonymous" email providers
BiteCode_dev 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, espacially exotic tld. I have a ".email" domain name, and I get 2 to 3 instances a year of either rejected forms, or sneakier, just confirmation email that never come until I use a .com address.
threeio 2 hours ago [-]
I have a 3 character .com as my primary email... it gets rejected more often than I'd like... including at my bank :) I've got a longer more normal domain that I alias, but it annoys me none the less.
gerdesj 50 minutes ago [-]
Have you got this lot sorted out:
MX->A->PTR->A->MX
SPF
DKIM
DMARC
mta-sts - DNS and webpage
Also your IPs must be squeaky bum clean, ideally for several years. DNSSEC might help too. In the UK getting as far as DKIM is usually enough (plus clean IPs, even FTTC connections will work if static).
thfuran 2 hours ago [-]
>there are a lot of services which, unfortunately, only allow sign-ups from big, well-known domains.
I have never encountered one.
ocdtrekkie 27 minutes ago [-]
Ars Technica is one you can test I believe. I think I had to register with Gmail and put in a support ticket to ask them to change it to my real email. I use Fastmail, not a selfhosted setup or anything, some services absolutely have a domain allowlist for email signup.
Hnrobert42 3 hours ago [-]
Nah. I have hosted my domain for 17 years on google and then fastmail. The hosting is harder than private relay, although not too hard.
But I have only had maybe 3 services ever reject my domain, and those were because the domain contains a number.
snark42 2 hours ago [-]
I've had some reject my e-mail address because it contains their company name. REI was one (ie it wouldn't allow rei@domain.com but would accept reicoop@domain.com)
js2 2 hours ago [-]
I was just able to create an account using `rei@<mydomain>` on rei.com w/o any issues. Now, figuring out how to delete the account is another matter entirely...
snark42 1 hours ago [-]
Cool, they probably changed it, this was years ago. I've had similar issues with other companies, REI is just the only one I can I really recall right now.
js2 55 minutes ago [-]
I've had my own domain for over two decades, typically use the exact pattern you describe for per-site email addresses, and have literally never run into it being blocked. Not once. Which is why I confirmed it with REI when you mentioned it, because it didn't sound right to me.
lxgr 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't had an outright rejection, but definitely a few odd moments with call center agents. "theircompanyname@myname.com" is definitely not the default expectation :)
lukeify 2 hours ago [-]
Within the space of 2 weeks I had both Etsy and Mapbox block signups with Proton Mail aliases. The practice is rapidly becoming more common.
bigstrat2003 24 minutes ago [-]
Blocking signups from proton.me is not the same thing as only allowing signups from the big mail providers.
jbverschoor 36 minutes ago [-]
Less private, but the most common case is actually anti-harassment.
Plenty of providers, but perhaps Apple needs to be forced to open up hide-my-email-providers for others.
Only the EU is capable of doing such thing
bigstrat2003 26 minutes ago [-]
I have had my own domain for mail for 10 years. I have yet to ever see a service which didn't let me sign up with it. I'm willing to believe that such services exist, but I dispute the claim that there are a lot of them.
stavros 55 minutes ago [-]
I've had my own domain for email for twenty years or so now, and I've encountered maybe one signup form that didn't accept it. What you're saying is definitely not true, and I would highly recommend using your own domain for email (preferably with Fastmail, it's fantastic).
theshackleford 2 hours ago [-]
I mean none of this is accurate, but sure.
JKCalhoun 48 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I have several dozen already—I suppose I can reuse those forever… I guess it's kind of cool having one-per-site though so you can tell who the "rat" is when one of your hide-my's gets spammed.
treesknees 24 minutes ago [-]
I have over 300 so far. In addition to knowing where spam is coming from, and being able to block it, it also helps prevent correlation across accounts and websites as data leaks occur.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
Yep, but I still generated some for myself just in case and fellow hackers can do the same if they want to.
iCloud+ was the best $1 / month custom domain email and email alias service with 100GB of E2EE cloud drive.
Obviously it will be sad to see it enshittified for seemingly no reason.
We've had to ask you many times to stop breaking the site guidelines. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. It shouldn't be hard to make your substantive points without being an asshole.
Problem is that using of own domain is creating huge privacy and cybersecurity risk since you can track all the person profiles across all the databases ever leaked.
Its nice as vanity item, but it's better not to use same domain across banks, online forums and porn sites. ;-)
chucksmash 2 hours ago [-]
1. Create a domain like myquickanonemailaccount.com.
2. Use the domain exclusively for hosting your own mail, but create a fake account creation page that just temporarily doesn't work.
3. As an added bonus, should you one day get a subpoena for information about one of your site user's online activities, you've got like a 24 hour head start on fleeing the country.
applfanboysbgon 40 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, real hackers use a uniquely identifying domain that lets everyone in the world trivially trace all of said hacker's online activity to the same person.
choilive 2 hours ago [-]
There are no true scotsman
sciencesama 1 hours ago [-]
we need s script to make date aliases for the next 10 years so one has a email for each day
giancarlostoro 4 hours ago [-]
If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
muse900 4 hours ago [-]
Yes but not always applicable unfortunately… e.g. the other day I was in Italy, I needed to park on the publicly available parking which was paid to the municipality.
No other parking available anywhere near in 30 mins walking distance. (paid or free)
I had to download a 3rd party app that asked me to register. This app isn’t by the Italian government, it’s affiliated though.
So in that situation, I want nothing to do with your website or app, because I wouldn’t able to park.
ivanjermakov 3 hours ago [-]
Have exactly the same situation with parking in Italy. Having a private company operating all paid parking on an island is not very healthy.
gedy 33 minutes ago [-]
It's too bad there's no one willing to be a parking lot attendant on an Italian island.
echelon 2 hours ago [-]
Having a handful of companies that can contact you has created a land of monopoly hyperscalers.
It's so hard to build anything big and durable because they've created these steep gradients.
drnick1 3 hours ago [-]
Can you not pay with cash or card anywhere? What if you don't have a "smart" phone? I would categorically refuse to park anywhere that requires running a proprietary app on my device. Fortunately, in the States at least, I have not encountered such a place yet.
cassianoleal 3 hours ago [-]
In the UK, I believe parking companies need to have a way to pay without the app but it's usually so bloody inconvenient that it's about the same as requiring it.
qalmakka 2 hours ago [-]
You need to find a working parking metre which may or may not work, accept cards or give back change. Also most if not all of parking apps allow you to pay by the exact minute and extended your stay dynamically from the go, while with a paper ticket you need to go back to the car and get another one before it expires
Slash65 2 hours ago [-]
In my city in Northern California our downtown uses an app for parking now. I don’t use it so it’s still an option, but you have to goto a kiosk, enter your license plate number, and pay with card. It’s made the downtown more of a ghost town (admittedly it was already dying) and the boomers with cash just don’t go. The younger 20somethings all complain “boomers are too stupid to use an app” and have no concern for privacy apparently. Welcome to the future I guess.
autoexec 2 hours ago [-]
> The younger 20somethings all complain “boomers are too stupid to use an app” and have no concern for privacy apparently.
They were literally trained not to value their privacy. The first generation of ipad kids now have driver's licenses.
calvinmorrison 3 hours ago [-]
Essentially too bad. Look at the parkmobile disaster.
ABS 3 hours ago [-]
you can pay at the parking meters directly, no need for a 3rd party app
qalmakka 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but
- the apps almost always allow you to remotely increase your stay
- the apps almost always allow you to pay by the exact minute instead of by the quarter/half an hour
vinni2 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately sometimes we are at some specific provider’s mercy for whatever reason like lack of appropriate alternatives.
MoonWalk 4 hours ago [-]
COUGHredditCOUGH
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
I think Reddit falls under this category.
> If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
MoonWalk 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, toxic garbage staffed largely by same. Unfortunately, it has amassed quite a bit of potentially useful information.
al_borland 2 hours ago [-]
You don’t need an account to access the information. It’s also all been sucked up my the LLMs, for better or worse.
SV_BubbleTime 4 hours ago [-]
IDK I’ve appreciated Reddit killing off good features like old version, putting a time-lock banner on mobile while logged out, trying to block VPNs when logged out, etc.
I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death.
What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward narrative machine, and everyone knows it.
pjerem 3 hours ago [-]
FWIW, old.reddit.com is still there and working
giantrobot 2 hours ago [-]
Shh, don't remind them.
lenerdenator 3 hours ago [-]
> I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death.
If the future's your oyster for what happens to Reddit, why stop there? If it's bought by somebody, that implies that Spez gets an amount of money that is greater than $0.00. Ideally, we avoid such a grim and unjust outcome. We want it to be made effectively worthless so he goes broke.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
RedReader still works. For now.
3 hours ago [-]
coldtea 2 hours ago [-]
It's precisely when I want "nothing to do with your website" that I want to use a private friendly email if I'm nonetheless forced to interact with it...
abirch 2 hours ago [-]
I frequently buy a domain that I think is funny and use that to forward all my emails to my main email account. It's trivial to do from Cloudflare. Then after that 1 year is up, my domain goes away and so does all of the spam.
pseudalopex 20 minutes ago [-]
And the not spam?
Bender 4 hours ago [-]
I ran into this with an NVMO mobile provider. They did not like my personal email domains (assorted .net and .org) so I nagged their customer support until they manually added it. Their marketing team happily emails my personal domains once added. Some day this will probably cause a problem but my goal is to eventually get rid of my cell phone either way.
reaperducer 3 hours ago [-]
I ran into this with an NVMO mobile provider.
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.
toast0 3 hours ago [-]
Even .us ??? Pretty sure I used my usual domain (enslaves.us) with them for wireless and california landline and u-verse.
Bender 2 hours ago [-]
Just a guess but .us does not permit whois privacy and perhaps that may be a factor but I am entirely guessing as all my domains have whois privacy enabled and they would not say why their system rejected my domains.
badc0ffee 2 hours ago [-]
Do you mean it was failing with a >3 character TLD?
abirch 2 hours ago [-]
could be < 3
.io
.co
.ai
joeyhage 4 hours ago [-]
Completely agree - have you encountered this before? The Gmail plus sign alias trick has been widely known for a long time and, to my knowledge, still works well today. It would be easy enough for websites to either block + in gmail addresses or instead grab the true email.
cloudfudge 2 hours ago [-]
Some sites that block "+" in email addresses are actually just doing it out of incompetence. My credit union, for example, will actually accept an address with a "+" in it, but nothing will work because some broken bit of web 1.0 plumbing along the way converted it to a space (it shows up that way on my profile page). I wouldn't be surprised to see " " on my printed bank statements.
autoexec 2 hours ago [-]
Spammers know to just cut out the +whatever. It's a simple regex to keep those from even getting into a database.
ciupicri 2 hours ago [-]
Guess what? There are some dumb website or applications complaining that the email address is invalid.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Gmail also have "googlemail.com" alias and you can split your username with dots since they dont count like "user@gmail.com" and "u.s.e.r@gmail.com" are the same thing,
Nothing of it solves privacy though.
yalogin 1 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT doesn’t allow private relay and hasn’t allowed it since launch may be. So it’s not always possible to not use them, of course now there is no need to use ChatGPT and I have just stopped and moved on from it
hamdingers 3 hours ago [-]
Great. If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway.
Of course this is industry-dependent (I'm in payments processing) and not every business should have this posture, but being able to distinguish between users who are going out of their way to be anonymous and users who aren't is a useful signal.
danudey 3 hours ago [-]
> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway
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.
hamdingers 2 hours ago [-]
I'm curious what you think the difference is between "a paying iCloud user" and "an anonymous rando off the internet." How many Apple gift cards do you reckon get sent to fraudsters every day? Decades worth of iCloud+ surely.
I'm running a business where I need to know who you are, because my platform can be used defraud other people. If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag.
If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)
If these terms are not acceptable to you, then great! Don't use the website, there's no need to be salty because that's what you said you wanted. Isn't it?
I don't mind either, because the number of legitimate users who are bothered by this restriction is infinitesimal compared to the number of fraudsters who would take advantage if it wasn't in place. It can be difficult to comprehend the scale of platform fraud unless you've worked in this area, many days fraudulent signups outnumber legitimate ones.
FireBeyond 10 minutes ago [-]
> If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag.
You conflate email with identity, just like the media companies conflated IP addresses.
It's not hiding who you are, it's hiding my real email address behind a mask that you can't choose to sell off to marketers, or spam yourself, or otherwise profit off, regardless of the nature of our relationship - I've got plenty of spam emails from companies that I closed accounts with, thus severing our relationship.
> If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)
It's not that simple, but I guarantee it doesn't remotely slow anyone down, not at the scales we're talking. Maybe if you're talking one entity and tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts, but it's laughably naive to believe that such a person who is set up to conduct "mass fraud" can't create 100 Gmail/Outlook/iCloud email addresses a day, if not an hour, with near zero effort (it's not like they're committing "mass fraud" by hand, after all).
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you are trying to shoehorn email into some kind of “real person verification” role, when you ought to be doing actual KYC through some provider like ID.me. (If honest to god no-shit fraud is on the table.)
hamdingers 1 hours ago [-]
If I can filter/throttle fraudsters at the create account step for free, I save on the fees my KYC/IDV providers charge each time they attempt to defeat it.
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
At the cost of blocking legitimate users who don’t want to be spammed, don’t want to be correlated after a data breach, etc.
I have been willing to do KYC for services (usually financial) without giving out my main email. Services that put up too many barriers to this don’t get my business. I concede that there aren’t that many users like me, compared to the general public, but I’m a legitimate user.
hamdingers 55 minutes ago [-]
Luckily I'm not obligated to serve legitimate users who's behavior is similar to that of fraudsters. That would make my job very difficult!
As I said above, and you concede, users like this are too small a minority to be worth worrying about.
anonymous908213 18 seconds ago [-]
Nowhere other than on HN have I seen so many people who are actively proud of their anti-consumer behaviour. It's a rather revealing look into the veil behind big tech. A lot of people have this misconception that it's evil $bigcorp forcing employees to do what earns a paycheck, but no, there's no shortage of normal people like yourself bragging about anything they can do to identify and track consumers more easily while comparing them to fraudsters for not wanting to be tracked. I suppose that's the narrative you have to concoct to help yourself sleep at night.
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
As others have alluded to, I'm not doing this to be anonymous, I'm doing this because companies can't be trusted not to leak my email address. Every real business that knows my real identity (banks, payroll, government, retailers, etc.) gets its own alias.
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.
cloudfudge 2 hours ago [-]
There's nothing "fake" about the email. It's just an alias made specifically for each recipient.
fg137 2 hours ago [-]
Didn't really have a choice with openrouter. I ended up using "Hide My Email" which gave me an icloud.com, which will likely no longer work according to this article.
Rebelgecko 1 hours ago [-]
It's pretty common. Shopify blocks my email aliases. So does ikea
x0x0 3 hours ago [-]
I used to run a hybrid mobile app + webapp company.
Private emails regularly lead to awful customer service interactions because people cannot tell us the email they used to register. Fastmail at least is off the beaten path enough that people probably can understand. Apple, especially using sign in with Apple, is horrid. And not just people unable to tell us the email; they then create multiple accounts; try to sign in on web and use their actual email and then have 2 accounts and flip shit that their stuff is gone; etc. Oh, and regularly blame us for their confusion.
trollbridge 3 hours ago [-]
It’s up to the app architect to make a way to make this work, and to stop using emails as anything other than a UUID type of token
JoblessWonder 2 hours ago [-]
So I guess the solution is just to begin to allow accounts to always register multiple emails? Although I guess the issue of multiple accounts is still going to exist if the users don't know the initial (private) email that they signed up with though unless there is a different unique ID that everyone will be able to remember.
I'm curious (and not trolling by asking) what a solution might be since email has been used as a unique account identifier for so long it is hard for my brain to think of another option at the moment.
weakened_malloc 2 hours ago [-]
Just a regular old username + password, kind of like HN allows?
JoblessWonder 1 hours ago [-]
I feel like email overtook usernames because it was more likely to be unique/memorable. I hate when websites ask me to remember a username (even though I'm using a password manager so I should really just calm down.)
2 hours ago [-]
HelloUsername 4 hours ago [-]
If your website needs an email address at all.. otherwise just use null@null.null, if it accepts and doesn't require a authentication code
octoberfranklin 2 hours ago [-]
I guess you don't use github. It won't let you sign up with @airmail.cc.
jonotime 3 hours ago [-]
Pro tip for doing something like this without apple. Buy or get a cheap domain name. Create a subdomain on it and have it catch and forward all messages to you when sent to that sub. For example:
nytimes@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail
anything-else@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail
You dont even need to materialize aliases at all.
shoo_pl 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is if someone figures it out and starts sending you spam to {random}@domain.tld. That's when you will need to sit down and start creating actual aliases for all those used email addresses and stop the catch-all forwarding:)
Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.
And the lack of privacy makes targeted scam/phishing more likely, and targeted scam is the one we are most susceptible to.
All in all, I am not saying this is bad idea, in fact I am doing it myself, just pointing out this is not so black and white.
Using iCloud solves those problems, but puts you at risk of getting your account banned and loosing access to those emails, so there is that.
Probably best way to deal with it is to get dedicated email domain with a bunch of your friends, and hook it up with something like SimpleLogin. But that's gets complicated quickly ;)
jonotime 2 hours ago [-]
I have run this for years with very little problems. And I can honestly say that have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain. Simple as this is, it is way to niche for companies to figure it out and exploit it. And if that really was a problem I'd just create a new subdomain.
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.
pseudalopex 22 minutes ago [-]
> I have run this for years with very little problems. And I can honestly say that have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain. Simple as this is, it is way to niche for companies to figure it out and exploit it.
Someone I knew did this. Spammers used lists of common names.
drnick1 19 minutes ago [-]
> Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.
Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
I've found using a subdomain helps with that, spammers will try everything@domain.tld but won't bother trying to brute force subdomains.
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.
switz 3 hours ago [-]
I do this. The awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address is [their_business_name]@my_weird_domain.tld
But the people usually just nod along.
The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
> The only awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address
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.
> 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.
I haven't had that, but before I switched to Hide My Email I've had many businesses ask if I was an employee of the business - many people don't intuit the difference between john@bank.com and bank@john.com.
kstrauser 2 hours ago [-]
"Sorry for the misunderstanding. My new email is yourcompanysucksinmyopinion@example.com."
jonotime 2 hours ago [-]
Just happened to me today! I was at the Verizon store and my address was verizon@... Sometimes it leads to confusion, but sometimes it leads to getting extra special treatment actually! They think I'm someone important.
chuckadams 3 hours ago [-]
They act as if I discovered fire when I give them a plussed address.
SXX 2 hours ago [-]
Its not the worst.
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.
snark42 3 hours ago [-]
You can proxy responses with a ton of e-mail clients, even Gmail supports it once you verify you can get a message sent to that address.
shoo_pl 2 hours ago [-]
Not really, this only works for other emails hosted by Gmail (including Workspaces) or if you supply SMPT that will send those emails. If you use simple email forwarding from your DNS provider, you don't have SMPT server to give to gmail:/
phi0 2 hours ago [-]
Google will happily send from smtp.gmail.com, after verifying that you own that email. You won’t get DKIM, but Google’s reputation is enough to make the mail land in people’s inboxes.
airstrike 2 hours ago [-]
sometimes I'm lazy and I just have it as spam@firstlast.com or noreply@firstlast.com and they get quite puzzled
Henchman21 2 hours ago [-]
So I guess I'll take a moment and plug my email provider, Fastmail. Their integration with 1Password to enable creation of Masked Email at account creation time is really fantastic! I have several hundred of these at this point, it's made my digital life appreciably better.
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!
quinncom 3 hours ago [-]
Gmail will block messages that fail SPF/DMARC alignment unless the forwarding mail server supports SRS.
pimlottc 2 hours ago [-]
SPF/DMARC/DKIM make this all a bit more complicated now. There are plenty of MTAs out there that will refuse to send you mail if it's not all correct.
drnick1 15 minutes ago [-]
This is absolutely not difficult to get right. You run OpenDKIM and OpenDMARC on your server along with your email stack (I use Postfix and Dovecot).
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve been doing this for years. It works fine and it’s fun to see who is selling your email.
But keep good records!!
It gets really awkward when you’re trying to recover an account and can’t remember what custom email you used.
jonotime 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think I only record maybe 10% of them that actually have logins associated. For the others I just search through my email.
fg137 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn't work when some service providers only allow email addresses that are on a whitelist of domains. And I have run into more than a few.
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
Services like DeepSeek have an email domain whitelist rather than blacklist. So creating your own domain just guarantees a lockout
drnick1 14 minutes ago [-]
That's nonsense. I have a DeepSeek account, of the form ai+deepseek@mydomain.com.
quotz 2 hours ago [-]
I do something similar, use an open source service called addy.io, bought a domain but you can also use their domains too, and each website has a separate login i create through bitwarden with the addy integration.
joeyhage 2 hours ago [-]
addy.io and proton pass are both great, affordable options. (Proton pass has a built in hide-my-email feature that supports custom domains)
quotz 2 hours ago [-]
addy.io is also self-hostable
gxs 1 hours ago [-]
iCloud itself does this for you if you bring your own domain fyi
mortenjorck 4 hours ago [-]
> Long story short: now both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email aliases are going to be issued on the @private.icloud.com subdomain. This makes it much easier to ban all aliases without affecting non-relay mailboxes on iCloud mail.
Could someone clarify why having Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email on the same domain would make a blanket ban easier rather than harder? What am I missing?
w10-1 4 hours ago [-]
Before, the emails were "me@icloud.com", the default for all apple users. There was no way to distinguish normal emails from generated private emails.
Now, they will be "blah@private.icloud.com", so it will be easy to ban the generated/private email that reduces the ability to associate logins across services.
Unclear why Apple would shoot themselves in this way; I hope it's not Ternus complying with anti-privacy.
utilize1808 3 hours ago [-]
maybe to avoid getting their legitimate email servers banned by other servers since they host (i.e. being exploited) a growing number of spam accounts.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
You cant send mail from Hide My Email aliases. They are only work one way.
I think I've also seen this in Mail.app but that's not shown on this page.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Wow my bad I wasnt aware its possible. I remember someone in HN comments complaining about it being one way only back in 2024.
UPD: apperently this supposedly only work if someone message you first. So you still cant spam from aliases.
mortenjorck 2 hours ago [-]
I see – somehow the Apple UI for this gave me the mistaken impression that privaterelay.appleid.com was the domain used by the alias, but I see now that it was always just icloud.com.
snowe2010 3 hours ago [-]
But it’s not? Like if they block that subdomain, they will completely block Sign in with Apple.
pokstad 2 hours ago [-]
You can use Hide My Email independently from Sign in with Apple.
snowe2010 2 hours ago [-]
I know that, but in doing so you prevent yourself from ever using Sign in with Apple
2 hours ago [-]
reaperducer 3 hours ago [-]
Now, they will be "blah@private.icloud.com"
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.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Apple stated legacy aliases will work as is:
> Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.
gobip 4 hours ago [-]
Apple was generating (something)@icloud.com whenever you used that service.
Now, it will use (something)@private.icloud.com instead. So you can ban this subdomain instantly, knowing people will be "hiding" with this service by default.
It's like blocking anondaddy, simplelogin etc but not protonmail.
BoorishBears 4 hours ago [-]
I guess their thought process is, both alias and non-alias accounts use @icloud.com
You were always able to reserve a normal icloud email address just like you would a GMail account, so banning all icloud email addresses would be banning non-alias Apple customers
That being said, I'm not convinced anyone who wanted to ban aliases couldn't have already. The alias emails look weird enough I'm guessing you could ban them with few false positives.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
> The alias emails look weird enough I'm guessing you could ban them with few false positives.
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.
nate 15 minutes ago [-]
I guess I'll go back to mailinator. That thing has 100s of aliases by the way for some that don't use that yet. Great service. Not guaranteed private really so don't depend on it for that. (Though if you use a strong has for a hash@mailinator.com address, is it pretty secure for "email purposes"?)
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
"Useless" is a leap. The kind of site that would block private relay emails is the kind that was already getting my burner anyway. The private relay is for sites I want to hear from, but also want a failsafe in case they're hacked later.
deepfriedbits 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly. No reasonable business will ban emails from this subdomain.
throwuxiytayq 2 hours ago [-]
Thankfully, we live in an unprecedented time of reasonable businesses lead by reasonable people. Close one. Nice save.
frollogaston 1 hours ago [-]
The unreasonable ones get my burner, so whatever
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
In the flip side, someone who blocks private.iCloud.com will block the ability to do SSO with Apple, thereby cutting themselves off from Apple’s ecosystem.
mdasen 2 hours ago [-]
Not really. You could allow private.icloud.com only if they're using Apple's SSO. If someone tries to create an account not using Apple's SSO, then you don't allow private.icloud.com email addresses.
ziml77 19 minutes ago [-]
Fastmail still generates theirs with @fastmail.com. And 1Password has an integration with them to quickly generate an address when creating a new account somewhere.
Cider9986 4 hours ago [-]
Determined sites could already easily do this. Just detect the patterns used. I agree it's a useless change though.
heave_balks_0g@icloud.com
It shouldn't matter for the sign in with apple because sites are already expressly supporting that.
Email aliasing is hard because you want privacy from a herd of users, but then you're locked into that ecosystem versus a domain you control has no herd, but the upside is no lock-in.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Not all aliases it generated look like this, some look like these:
viods01crew@icloud.com
methyl.brick1h@icloud.com
In any case fact that some services banned alies is not the reason to make them completely useless instead of making them better.
Apple is one of few companies that ia able to push for this with market share.
tehwebguy 4 hours ago [-]
> Determined sites could already easily do this
They already DO do it, I don't know how they're currently determining it
keane 3 hours ago [-]
I think the NYT might be one detecting them which is funny because their editorial staff have promoted the use of aliases.
teekert 2 hours ago [-]
I use Proton aliases everywhere...Well not everywhere, there are indeed quite some places that don't accept a passmail.net address... So I can imagine this becoming a useless feature, at least on some sites.
Btw I only use these aliases for sites where I don't mind loosing the login, otherwise it would the mother of all lock-ins... Would have been nice if I could opt for aliases on my own (secondary?) domain... At least then I could still move them (using wildcards or some exported list).
sxg 2 hours ago [-]
You can create custom aliases on your own domain. I do this for every log in and am migrating old emails to my custom domain aliases.
k1next 3 hours ago [-]
For me personally, Hide My Email is binding me to the Apple ecosystem more than iMessage (but I'm European).
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
Does it? I use Hide My Email largely without integration to the Apple ecosystem - I generate new emails on icloud.com and copy/paste them to login forms before saving to 1Password.
KomoD 1 hours ago [-]
Same, Hide My Email is pretty much the only Apple service I use and the aliases are only for accounts I don't really care about.
It’s unsettling, you’re either an iCloud customer for life or hundreds of logins could break.
weberer 2 hours ago [-]
Nothing breaks when you switch. You just can't create more private icloud addresses. I recently switched back to Android and can still use my old icloud logins.
SXX 2 hours ago [-]
But what happen if you stop paying $1 / month?
KomoD 1 hours ago [-]
If you cancel iCloud+, all the aliases remain active. As parent said, you just can't create more of them.
abujazar 2 hours ago [-]
Almost all of my iCloud relayed addresses are already @privaterelay.appleid.com, and they've been working perfectly. So I don't expect this to change any time soon.
catgirlinspace 2 hours ago [-]
That domain is only used for Sign in with Apple.
frollogaston 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe they've started seeing sites ban @icloud.com addresses
msdz 3 hours ago [-]
Which has more market pull: Some web site or Apple?
frollogaston 1 hours ago [-]
iCloud email isn't very popular. I always have to spell it out verbally if someone asks, and sometimes they end up emailing @gmail.com anyway.
jamesreadsnews 2 hours ago [-]
I guess the new subdomain address implies a paid iCloud user, not a free mail freeloader, and that could be a positive thing.
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
Almost surprised it lasted this long but quite disappointing
elcombato 3 hours ago [-]
The rate limit seems to be 20/hour and not 30/hour as mentioned in the article.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Just wait 20 minutes. I generated like 40 in under an hour. No idea what limits are though and how they refresh.
ahepp 2 hours ago [-]
I got stopped after 5
nate 25 minutes ago [-]
ugh. why? claude thinks this is pressure from trump admin because of someone who used Hide My Email to send email to Kash Patel's girlfriend?
nozzlegear 2 minutes ago [-]
My dog thinks it's because we're running low on milkbones, but my cats aren't convinced.
stormed 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if the existing hidden emails I already have in iCloud will be changed over too. If that's not the case, I'm just going to use one of the 50 throwaway addresses I already have.
pseudalopex 28 minutes ago [-]
The announcement the article linked said Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.
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nerdjon 4 hours ago [-]
I would bet that doing so would be a pretty quick way to have your app pulled.
They already require that you use Sign in with Apple, I would think that it working fully is also a requirement?
pseudalopex 39 minutes ago [-]
> They already require that you use Sign in with Apple, I would think that it working fully is also a requirement?
They require apps offer a service which meets their privacy requirements if they use any 3rd party or social login service.[1] And apps could block private.icloud.com for email and not Sign in with Apple.
You can use Hide My Email on any website though, whereas Sign In with Apple is limited to just those websites and apps that support it. Sign In with Apple isn't nearly as popular on the web, so it's a lot easier to just ban "@private.icloud.com" from your web service there.
layer8 4 hours ago [-]
Hide My Email isn’t particularly related to apps. You can use it on any web form that asks for your email address, or as the sender of any email message you send using Apple Mail.
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getcrunk 4 hours ago [-]
Okay but banning private relay emails would also mean your site is blocking Apple sign in?
9dev 3 hours ago [-]
That was always opt-in from the sites, and many never bothered - me included, because I refuse to pay Apple $99 per year for the privilege to offer easier authentication to their users.
wxw 4 hours ago [-]
I pay for Fastmail just for masked email and its integration with 1Password.
darknoon 3 hours ago [-]
I frequently run into scenarios where it won't let me generate the email within 1password on a website, and I have to go to Fastmail and then manually do it. Is this something you have bene able to work around?
mthoms 2 hours ago [-]
Same problem here.
I sure wish 1Password + Fastmail would let you generate them within the 1Password app without requiring a browser sign-up page in the middle.
KiDD 3 hours ago [-]
I guess I don't understand the concern... what does it matter if a different domain is used for Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email?
9dev 3 hours ago [-]
Because many sites check the domain part of your email address against a blocklist, which contains entries like trashmail.com to prevent users from signing up with ad-hoc throwaway accounts. They don't want that, because they'd like to get a proper lead they can either track, sell, or reach out to.
Now Hide My Email allowed you to do just that: Create an account with an email that wasn't tied to your identity, and that you could just decommission if you didn't need it anymore. Sites had no way to detect these either, because all of the randomly generated addresses Apple provided you with just ended in @icloud.com, which is also used by tons of regular accounts - so if you blocked this domain, you'd invariably preclude millions of people from your service.
But by separating the domains, sites can simply add private.icloud.com to their trash mail blocklist, preventing the use of Hide My Email, while regular @iCloud.com addresses will continue to work. It makes the entire service useless at once.
snowe2010 3 hours ago [-]
But that will completely break Sign in with Apple, which no service is ever going to do. I really don’t get the problem here.
9dev 2 hours ago [-]
A tiny, tiny fraction of sites and apps offer Sign in with Apple. Every single service with user accounts under the sun allows signing up with a Hide My Email address.
That random online shop you order something from once? The IT forum that only shows external links for signed-in users? The whacky new AI tool you want to try out? The startup "sign up for updates" newsletter box? None of these offer Sign in with Apple. For all of them Hide My Email avoids having to disclose your real email address. This is broken now.
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
Most services would never support Sign in with Apple anyway. Honestly most services don't even support social sign-in at all
chatmasta 3 hours ago [-]
Right now it’s the same @icloud.com domain as normal personal emails. Now all auto-generated emails will use a separate domain name, so sites can block emails with that domain, without worrying about blocking people’s main personal email.
twobitshifter 3 hours ago [-]
Websites block certain throwaway email domains from signups. The concern is that this will happen with private.icloud.com
A good example of a throwaway email that is now useless because of these blocks is mailinator.com. Originally, you could just make up a random email on the spot like gregsrightfoot@mailinator.com, visit mailinator.com, and get the needed signup verification email. These services autodeleted messages and required no signup so they were a black hole for spam. However websites eventually got wise that their spam wasn’t being seen and started blocking the domain. Mailinator came up with alternative domains and there was a brief back and forth before the throwaway email domains all ended up being blocked.
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smth-smth-ai 3 hours ago [-]
simplelogin from Proton works great, can recommend; for Uber I generate uber.random-word@simplelogin.com, for Slack slack.random-word etc to easily see who leaked my email
vslira 3 hours ago [-]
Where do I sign to show my opposition to this change? Hide My Email has been essential to keep my digital life protected from abusive mail lists and frankly one of the features that make me associate icloud with a premium service
Mindwipe 2 hours ago [-]
Urgh, that's a huge downgrade. What a shame.
kylehotchkiss 3 hours ago [-]
Did Hide My Email addresses cause problems for deliverability for actual emails/users on iCloud?
righthand 3 hours ago [-]
Emailfake.com
Fastmail also has wonderful random email functionality you can link up to your Bitwarden client or use the Fastmail API.
risyachka 4 hours ago [-]
Shameless plug - I created a chrome extension that allows to create unique email addresses that forward to your real inbox. It uses Cloudflare email routing, simplifies creating/labeling of new addresses and keeping track of them. Always 1 click away.
The addresses are pre-allocated and recycled when deleted so creating a new one is faster that with Apple's hide my mail.
With cloudflare you can also just setup catch-all and be done wirh it.
I personally doing catch-all already, but problem is that using your own domain for website registration basically gives everyone unique id to eaaily connect all the information that ever been leaked for your accounts and something always gets leaked.
Not a very good idea for privacy.
risyachka 3 hours ago [-]
The biggest upside for me of having separate labelled mailboxes is I can use one, delete it later and never receive mail from it again.
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
My email addresses been public for years and spam was never a big issue.
But yeah it mostly opposite problem I would say - spam filters eat usefull stuff sometimes. Just today I found one more job related email in spam, but its from public mailbox damn.
Privacy is kind a bigger issue and having aliases on icloud is just much more convinient than having 10 accounts.
mixdup 2 hours ago [-]
with something like cloudflare forwarding you can black-hole an address if it becomes a problem
Terretta 3 hours ago [-]
Pretty good way to harvest magic links and email codes!
rafram 4 hours ago [-]
Doesn't owning the domain kind of defeat the point?
drnick1 3 hours ago [-]
Not really, at least if you register the domain anonymously. You get unlimited emails, and I assign one to each website or registration.
doctorpangloss 4 hours ago [-]
email isn't really a decentralized system at all. Google, Microsoft and Amazon own e-mail delivery. Perhaps Google ads customers complained that they could not correlated private @icloud addresses, and we are now witnessing the consequences. What Apple got in exchange from Google, I don't know, I'm sure it is related to their Siri deal.
rafram 4 hours ago [-]
[citation badly needed]
SXX 3 hours ago [-]
Come on. Most likely this is just a result of some manager pushing for "improvement": "Why we have two different privacy email alias systems? Lets make unified one, save on maintenace and I get promotion".
And might be there just no one remain as owner of feature to explain them why its bad idea.
Razengan 4 hours ago [-]
Oh fuck. I love Hide My Email and it's been the best feature about iCloud ever since it came out.
It's actually useful compared to Gmail's useless "yourrealaddress+alais" that gives away your actual email anyway, and it helped me catch quite a few spammers/data sellers.
Hide My Email addresses already have a peculiar format that others could guess, and some do block those, and there's no reason to add a blatant "private." tag.
This is a win for privacy-intruders, not users, just like Apple's iCloud Keychain API that has allowed Facebook, TikTok etc. to secretly track users across multiple devices and device reinstalls for years.
jjice 4 hours ago [-]
FWIW it's not a gmail thing for privacy, but rather just part of the email spec. RFC 5233 talks about it.
It all dates back to the Andrew Messaging System at CMU, developed in the 1980's. Originally the format was "<username>+<keyword>+<args>@example.net" where the mail server would interpret the keyword and arguments to route the message in whatever unique way that keyword would dictate (e.g. bob+dist+~/mailinglist@example.net would read the file mailinglist in Bob's home directory and deliver the email to addresses listed in it). If the keyword was not recognized, it would just deliver normally. So bob@example.net and bob+alias@example.net were equivalent, and could be used to filter after the fact if desired.
9dev 3 hours ago [-]
Did the RFC editor get a makeover recently? It looks familiar, but also kinda… polished. Neat.
Part of the reason to use Hide My Email was that it made keeping myself private hassle-free. Making a system to pre-generate values and then catalog them for later use is quite the hassle.
What you’d lose is the reply-to forwarding feature.
As far as I can tell, nobody blocks it. Google sometimes rejects emails where the from address doesn't match the real sending address, which is fair.
I guess the first couple of years were rocky, I hadn't figured out DKIM and SPF and all the other blood rituals yet. Back then I got blocked by Steam and banks. But ever since I set up the correct security it's been fine. Been my primary email for a long long time. All my online accounts are tied to it.
Incidentally, I also have free and unlimited aliases. But I don't usually bother because I have a rule to route all messages to unknown addresses into a special folder. I can give out any random address at my domain and it will always make it back to me. So much more convenient than logging into the website to generate an alias.
The biggest issue was if your ip address got listed in a RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), and then nobody would talk to you. Some were easy to get off, others were permanent blocks, and I found those to be constantly interfering with the delivery of mail. At least the rejection would usually tell you which RBL blocked you.
I have never encountered one.
But I have only had maybe 3 services ever reject my domain, and those were because the domain contains a number.
Plenty of providers, but perhaps Apple needs to be forced to open up hide-my-email-providers for others.
Only the EU is capable of doing such thing
iCloud+ was the best $1 / month custom domain email and email alias service with 100GB of E2EE cloud drive.
Obviously it will be sad to see it enshittified for seemingly no reason.
We've had to ask you many times to stop breaking the site guidelines. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. It shouldn't be hard to make your substantive points without being an asshole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Problem is that using of own domain is creating huge privacy and cybersecurity risk since you can track all the person profiles across all the databases ever leaked.
Its nice as vanity item, but it's better not to use same domain across banks, online forums and porn sites. ;-)
2. Use the domain exclusively for hosting your own mail, but create a fake account creation page that just temporarily doesn't work.
3. As an added bonus, should you one day get a subpoena for information about one of your site user's online activities, you've got like a 24 hour head start on fleeing the country.
No other parking available anywhere near in 30 mins walking distance. (paid or free)
I had to download a 3rd party app that asked me to register. This app isn’t by the Italian government, it’s affiliated though.
So in that situation, I want nothing to do with your website or app, because I wouldn’t able to park.
It's so hard to build anything big and durable because they've created these steep gradients.
They were literally trained not to value their privacy. The first generation of ipad kids now have driver's licenses.
- the apps almost always allow you to remotely increase your stay - the apps almost always allow you to pay by the exact minute instead of by the quarter/half an hour
> If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death.
What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward narrative machine, and everyone knows it.
If the future's your oyster for what happens to Reddit, why stop there? If it's bought by somebody, that implies that Spez gets an amount of money that is greater than $0.00. Ideally, we avoid such a grim and unjust outcome. We want it to be made effectively worthless so he goes broke.
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.
Of course this is industry-dependent (I'm in payments processing) and not every business should have this posture, but being able to distinguish between users who are going out of their way to be anonymous and users who aren't is a useful signal.
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.
I'm running a business where I need to know who you are, because my platform can be used defraud other people. If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag.
If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)
If these terms are not acceptable to you, then great! Don't use the website, there's no need to be salty because that's what you said you wanted. Isn't it?
I don't mind either, because the number of legitimate users who are bothered by this restriction is infinitesimal compared to the number of fraudsters who would take advantage if it wasn't in place. It can be difficult to comprehend the scale of platform fraud unless you've worked in this area, many days fraudulent signups outnumber legitimate ones.
You conflate email with identity, just like the media companies conflated IP addresses.
It's not hiding who you are, it's hiding my real email address behind a mask that you can't choose to sell off to marketers, or spam yourself, or otherwise profit off, regardless of the nature of our relationship - I've got plenty of spam emails from companies that I closed accounts with, thus severing our relationship.
> If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)
It's not that simple, but I guarantee it doesn't remotely slow anyone down, not at the scales we're talking. Maybe if you're talking one entity and tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts, but it's laughably naive to believe that such a person who is set up to conduct "mass fraud" can't create 100 Gmail/Outlook/iCloud email addresses a day, if not an hour, with near zero effort (it's not like they're committing "mass fraud" by hand, after all).
I have been willing to do KYC for services (usually financial) without giving out my main email. Services that put up too many barriers to this don’t get my business. I concede that there aren’t that many users like me, compared to the general public, but I’m a legitimate user.
As I said above, and you concede, users like this are too small a minority to be worth worrying about.
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.
Private emails regularly lead to awful customer service interactions because people cannot tell us the email they used to register. Fastmail at least is off the beaten path enough that people probably can understand. Apple, especially using sign in with Apple, is horrid. And not just people unable to tell us the email; they then create multiple accounts; try to sign in on web and use their actual email and then have 2 accounts and flip shit that their stuff is gone; etc. Oh, and regularly blame us for their confusion.
I'm curious (and not trolling by asking) what a solution might be since email has been used as a unique account identifier for so long it is hard for my brain to think of another option at the moment.
nytimes@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail
anything-else@mailsub.example.com -> jono@gmail
You dont even need to materialize aliases at all.
Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.
And the lack of privacy makes targeted scam/phishing more likely, and targeted scam is the one we are most susceptible to.
All in all, I am not saying this is bad idea, in fact I am doing it myself, just pointing out this is not so black and white.
Using iCloud solves those problems, but puts you at risk of getting your account banned and loosing access to those emails, so there is that.
Probably best way to deal with it is to get dedicated email domain with a bunch of your friends, and hook it up with something like SimpleLogin. But that's gets complicated quickly ;)
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.
Someone I knew did this. Spammers used lists of common names.
Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.
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.
But the people usually just nod along.
The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).
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 haven't had that, but before I switched to Hide My Email I've had many businesses ask if I was an employee of the business - many people don't intuit the difference between john@bank.com and bank@john.com.
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!
But keep good records!!
It gets really awkward when you’re trying to recover an account and can’t remember what custom email you used.
Could someone clarify why having Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email on the same domain would make a blanket ban easier rather than harder? What am I missing?
Now, they will be "blah@private.icloud.com", so it will be easy to ban the generated/private email that reduces the ability to associate logins across services.
Unclear why Apple would shoot themselves in this way; I hope it's not Ternus complying with anti-privacy.
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/use-hide-my-email-in-...
I think I've also seen this in Mail.app but that's not shown on this page.
UPD: apperently this supposedly only work if someone message you first. So you still cant spam from aliases.
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.
> Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.
It's like blocking anondaddy, simplelogin etc but not protonmail.
You were always able to reserve a normal icloud email address just like you would a GMail account, so banning all icloud email addresses would be banning non-alias Apple customers
That being said, I'm not convinced anyone who wanted to ban aliases couldn't have already. The alias emails look weird enough I'm guessing you could ban them with few false positives.
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.
heave_balks_0g@icloud.com
It shouldn't matter for the sign in with apple because sites are already expressly supporting that.
Email aliasing is hard because you want privacy from a herd of users, but then you're locked into that ecosystem versus a domain you control has no herd, but the upside is no lock-in.
Apple is one of few companies that ia able to push for this with market share.
They already DO do it, I don't know how they're currently determining it
Btw I only use these aliases for sites where I don't mind loosing the login, otherwise it would the mother of all lock-ins... Would have been nice if I could opt for aliases on my own (secondary?) domain... At least then I could still move them (using wildcards or some exported list).
I use this wonderful extension to make it easy to generate aliases https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...
They already require that you use Sign in with Apple, I would think that it working fully is also a requirement?
They require apps offer a service which meets their privacy requirements if they use any 3rd party or social login service.[1] And apps could block private.icloud.com for email and not Sign in with Apple.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/27/sign-in-with-apple-rules-app-...
I sure wish 1Password + Fastmail would let you generate them within the 1Password app without requiring a browser sign-up page in the middle.
Now Hide My Email allowed you to do just that: Create an account with an email that wasn't tied to your identity, and that you could just decommission if you didn't need it anymore. Sites had no way to detect these either, because all of the randomly generated addresses Apple provided you with just ended in @icloud.com, which is also used by tons of regular accounts - so if you blocked this domain, you'd invariably preclude millions of people from your service.
But by separating the domains, sites can simply add private.icloud.com to their trash mail blocklist, preventing the use of Hide My Email, while regular @iCloud.com addresses will continue to work. It makes the entire service useless at once.
That random online shop you order something from once? The IT forum that only shows external links for signed-in users? The whacky new AI tool you want to try out? The startup "sign up for updates" newsletter box? None of these offer Sign in with Apple. For all of them Hide My Email avoids having to disclose your real email address. This is broken now.
A good example of a throwaway email that is now useless because of these blocks is mailinator.com. Originally, you could just make up a random email on the spot like gregsrightfoot@mailinator.com, visit mailinator.com, and get the needed signup verification email. These services autodeleted messages and required no signup so they were a black hole for spam. However websites eventually got wise that their spam wasn’t being seen and started blocking the domain. Mailinator came up with alternative domains and there was a brief back and forth before the throwaway email domains all ended up being blocked.
Fastmail also has wonderful random email functionality you can link up to your Bitwarden client or use the Fastmail API.
The addresses are pre-allocated and recycled when deleted so creating a new one is faster that with Apple's hide my mail.
https://github.com/webmonch/hide-my-mail-cloudflare
I personally doing catch-all already, but problem is that using your own domain for website registration basically gives everyone unique id to eaaily connect all the information that ever been leaked for your accounts and something always gets leaked.
Not a very good idea for privacy.
But yeah it mostly opposite problem I would say - spam filters eat usefull stuff sometimes. Just today I found one more job related email in spam, but its from public mailbox damn.
Privacy is kind a bigger issue and having aliases on icloud is just much more convinient than having 10 accounts.
And might be there just no one remain as owner of feature to explain them why its bad idea.
It's actually useful compared to Gmail's useless "yourrealaddress+alais" that gives away your actual email anyway, and it helped me catch quite a few spammers/data sellers.
Hide My Email addresses already have a peculiar format that others could guess, and some do block those, and there's no reason to add a blatant "private." tag.
This is a win for privacy-intruders, not users, just like Apple's iCloud Keychain API that has allowed Facebook, TikTok etc. to secretly track users across multiple devices and device reinstalls for years.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5233/