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  • Hacker News
  • I've noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.
    by postalcoder
  • 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
    by cush
  • 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?
    by nate
  • My guess is Ternus is starting to take more and more control. Tim was pretty absent and phoning it in the past few years.
    by VCFundedGenYer
  • Good. This would have made blocking them trivial.
    by floam
  • Apple had been on a steady path of bad decisions since a few years, I'm glad to see they reverted at least on this one.

    Now if they could completely remove liquid glass...

    by aucisson_masque
  • 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.
    by wijayaerick
  • Good. What else can really be said? Only way for it to work and not be trivially blocked is to mix with legit emails.
    by amazingamazing
  • A lot of places also don't really like icloud addresses in general. This is one of Apple's better offerings though.
    by jambalaya8
  • Oh I glad there is still someone at Apple who understood its insanity. If only they made it generate a bit more sensible alias names.

    UPD: I obviously mean alias addresses template make most of them too easy to recognize.

    by SXX
  • Yeah, I don't really get the excitement. The pattern in which these aliases are generated might as well just end with private.icloud.com.

    Is breest-tas.7n@icloud.com really that hard to detect as hide my email?

    by glub
  • Can't the aliases be renamed?

    ---

    Just checked, they can. Phew. If the forwarding alias was detectable/always used the same schema, that'd also make them borderline useless, just like the `privaterelay` subdomain

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

    by dannyw
  • I'm glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to
    by joshuat
  • I wish I could set up "Sign in with Apple" on a blog without paying $99/yr for a developer license.
    by philip1209
  • Why do you want this.

    Is it a benefit to you? If it is why should you not pay for that benefit?

    Nothing is free.

    by pasc1878
  • Is your audience very Apple heavy?
    by chanux
  • 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

    by NotThatFast
  • 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.
    by Quothling
  • 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'm just getting profits. No other spam since I'm using email aliases.

    by wafflemaker
  • 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.
    by hollow-moe
  • how is the user being held hostage? you can redirect hide my email addresses to any domain
    by dilyevsky
  • Case in point: many websites block all VPN except iCloud Private Relay. Thank you Apple!
    by HeavenFox
  • 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.

    by kqp
  • Fastmail is awesome. Happy customer for many years. Zero problems.
    by chrisweekly
  • > This is a huge selling point.

    Same thoughts. I'm annoyed with the number of services that blocks alias domains.

    At least I don't see services attempting to block @icloud.com domains.

    by 8cvor6j844qw_d6
  • Indeed, Proton’s passmail are sometimes not accepted sadly.
    by teekert
  • Yep I have a few @firefox.com addresses from the inital launch of Firefox Relay. Come in handy for some of the more stubborn sites that block private addresses.
    by jdoe1337halo
  • > 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.

    You assume that the domain is used by one person or what?

    Also, the point of these is typically to prevent spam. Noone is going to spend a fraction of a cent or second to try and figure out who is behind the adress.

    by tjoff