Every time an app or website asks for an email address during sign up, Apple's Hide My Email feature acts as a handy shield, letting you skip handing over your real address. Most people only share their actual email with companies and services they genuinely trust. Now, though, a development is set to worry privacy conscious users, because Apple is planning to make Hide My Email less effective. The good news is that even if the feature loses some of its punch, there are solid alternatives worth turning to.
What Hide My Email actually does
If you are not familiar with this privacy tool, here is the gist. For anyone with an iCloud+ subscription, Hide My Email generates email aliases that forward messages to your real address. You can use these aliases anywhere you would normally type your actual email, holding on to some anonymity while still enjoying the convenience of a single inbox.
Say you are creating a new account somewhere. Instead of entering your real email when prompted, Hide My Email spins up a unique, random address, something like guppies_trick_2i@icloud.com (yes, they really look like that). As silly as the aliases may seem, they are invaluable for protecting your privacy. Any message sent to one of these aliases lands in your real inbox, exactly as if it had been sent to your actual address, without ever exposing that address to the sender. Better still, if an alias is ever compromised, you can shut it down without touching your real email. Win-win.
What Apple is changing
This setup has worked smoothly for years. Now Apple is preparing to unify the alias domains used by Hide My Email with those used by Sign in with Apple. Sign in with Apple, the feature that lets you register for services using your Apple Account, generates privaterelay.appleid.com domains for your account address. Going forward, both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email will use private.icloud.com domains. In the example above, your alias would become guppies_trick_2i@private.icloud.com instead of guppies_trick_2i@icloud.com.
From Apple's point of view, this streamlines things, keeping both privacy login features tied to the same domain. For the rest of us, however, it chips away at what makes Hide My Email so useful.
Where the new domain creates a problem
The biggest strength of the current system is that a Hide My Email alias is indistinguishable from a standard iCloud email. A human might glance at guppies_trick_2i@icloud.com and sense something is off, but a system only registers that it is a valid @icloud.com address. So it treats the alias like any other iCloud email and lets you through.
The new domain, on the other hand, signals to anyone, human or system, that the address is in fact an alias. That means companies could block @private.icloud.com addresses from signing up for services altogether, which would defeat the entire purpose of Hide My Email.
Apple says existing Hide My Email domains will keep working normally, so your old aliases will be fine. The risk lies with new aliases created after the change takes effect, which could fail. If most companies and services do not treat @private.icloud.com addresses any differently from a typical domain, the feature remains worth using. But if blocking these aliases becomes common practice, that changes everything.
Alternatives you can use instead
If these changes really do dent Hide My Email's effectiveness, do not fret, because there are several capable alternatives to try.
- Proton Mail: It offers its own take on the feature. Unlimited aliases require a paid subscription, but you can generate 10 for free.
- DuckDuckGo: Its version, called Email Protection, creates aliases using the @duck.com domain.
- Mozilla Firefox Relay: This option also works with phone numbers, making it the best pick if you want to completely hide your contact information from companies and services.
