162 pointsby K7PJP2 hours ago12 comments
  • hollow-moe2 hours ago
    Using icloud.com domain for legit and hidden adresses is such a typical Apple strategy of holding their own users and "others" (ie. other web services, other users etc) hostage simultaneously. But at least here it is actually a good reason that works for the user.
    • dilyevsky5 minutes ago
      how is the user being held hostage? you can redirect hide my email addresses to any domain
      • travoca minute ago
        Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.
  • joshuat2 hours ago
    I'm glad they listened - I use this feature extensively and would like to continue to
  • giwook13 minutes ago
    Can someone explain the backstory behind this? I'm reading some of the comments here and I feel like I'm missing something here.
    • dannyw8 minutes ago
      For the "hide my email" feature, Apple currently and has always used "@icloud.com". This masks you amongst all iCloud users.

      They were planning to change it to a custom domain, which would allow sites to easily filter out and reject "Hide my email" users based on the email.

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

  • NotThatFast2 hours ago
    One of the best things about it. Also being able to add several emails per custom domain for free.

    Whole thing is 99c a month. Makes Gmail seem like a joke in comparison.

    Until you get an email from an iCloud address on Gmail and see it go right to spam haha. Suddenly Gmail is cheap again

    • Quothlingan hour ago
      Maybe it's because I live in a country where e-mai isn't really used that much for personal communication, but wouldn't this mainly be a gmail issue? If mails I wanted ended up in the spam folder I'd not use gmail. I mean, I pay for protonmail, so I wouldn't use gmail to begin with, but if mails I wanted ended up in my protonmail spamfolder and I couldn't do anything about it, then I'd switch away from protonmail.
      • NotThatFastan hour ago
        You are 100% correct and yet the masses still prefer it.

        World’s a twisted place!

        I would guess the average Gmail user doesn’t know that it reports virtually all iCloud as Spam - believing instead that it’s genuinely being filtered by quality engineering at Google.

  • xaviervn2 hours ago
    I don't understand how this changes anything. IIRC, the complaints were about Apple making the Hide My Email addresses different than regular ones.

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

    • NobodyNada2 hours ago
      It's talking about two different services:

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

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

    • LoganDark2 hours ago
      Sign in with Apple is Apple's SSO, like Sign in with Google. Services have to support this one explicitly, and it already had a special subdomain, so the specific subdomain is simply changing.

      Hide My Email is the manually generated ones, for websites that accept an arbitrary email address. This is the one where it's valuable for the relays to be identical to genuine iCloud addresses, otherwise websites could try to block it and force you to use a more revealing email address, undermining privacy.

  • postalcoder2 hours ago
    I've noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.
    • VCFundedGenYer41 minutes ago
      My guess is Ternus is starting to take more and more control. Tim was pretty absent and phoning it in the past few years.
    • cushan hour ago
      Hmm it’s almost as if people are paying good money for iCloud+ or something. They aren’t google and shouldn’t be retiring their services as if they’re giving them away for free
    • nate2 hours ago
      Anyone have a theory why this even made it to this point? the switch was such obviously a bad idea. just corporate weirdness that no one there bothered to raise their hand and be like "uh, are we really doing this?" or was there a story here that anyone knows about?
      • jofzaran hour ago
        It's email reputation, it the always the answer with this kind of stuff.

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

        • Marsymarsan hour ago
          The bounce rate of what, exactly?

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

          Whenever I start getting spam at an address that's been leaked, I deactivate it. I've done the same with my oldest gmail account, but the work required there is notably higher.

          • MBCookan hour ago
            If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues.

            Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private one. So it’s not like they were “camouflaged.“

            It’s a little odd they’re switching the subdomain though.

            • jtbayly29 minutes ago
              Hide My Email already uses plain old @iCloud.com as the domain.

              They are not changing the subdomain. There isn’t one. The announcement is they are leaving it as-is.

              The email addresses for sign-in with Apple do use the @private.iCloud.com subdomain, but again, that’s not a change.

            • Marsymars43 minutes ago
              Right, but I'm asking "what bounce issues?"

              Like for my usage there are no bounce issues with the ~400 legitimate providers that I have Hide My Email addresses from. The only ones with bounce issues are the spammers who've acquired leaked addresses that I've deactivated.

              • saurik26 minutes ago
                If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penalize senders the way, say, Google would if they see you sending a ton of email to their domains and they all bounce -- but people tend to use services to help send email and centrally pool their reputation (such as mailchimp) and so these services themselves then watch the bounce rate of their individual customers and either charge them more or ban their access due to the bounce rate increase.
      • super256an hour ago
        Maybe hidemyemail allows easily creating many accounts on a site. And some big site didn't like it.

        The "Sign-up via Apple" button and creating an iCloud email yourself have a slightly higher barrier than creating a new throwaway hidemyemail email (1 API call w/o captcha/phone verification or whatever).

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

        • pestsan hour ago
          It does, and I know a friend of a friend who uses them for Walmart accounts to bot pokemon drops. Those and office aliases.
  • amazingamazing2 hours ago
    Good. What else can really be said? Only way for it to work and not be trivially blocked is to mix with legit emails.
    • jambalaya82 hours ago
      A lot of places also don't really like icloud addresses in general. This is one of Apple's better offerings though.
  • floam2 hours ago
    Good. This would have made blocking them trivial.
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • prism562 hours ago
    Good! Was there ever a compelling reason why they went for this switch initially?
    • floam2 hours ago
      Yes, to fully fix a certain class of bug on their infra.
      • culi2 hours ago
        Do you know any more about it or have a link where I can read more?
  • delduca2 hours ago
    That was a stupid idea (the prev one)
  • trueno2 hours ago
    thank god -.-