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Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.

I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:

- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam

- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)

- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.

I configured about a dozen domains to have MX records for the mailinator disposable inbox service for about a decade for free as a gift and the domains were toxic for any other email use case for years afterwards… they were so abused you couldn’t even sign up for most web services with any email associated by the time I stopped renewing them… there are still GitHub lists of disposable email addresses that list to blacklist those domains (and many other), so, I agree. If the big providers don’t offer disposable email addresses there is no good option.

> 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.

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

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

Is your audience very Apple heavy?

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".

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.

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.

private.icloud.com (née privaterelay.appleid.com) is the address for “Sign In With Apple”, which is an oauth-style service that sites opt into to let you use your Apple ID to sign in. Sites offering this as a signup option are already aware it gives users an option to use a private anonymized email address.

The toplevel “Hide My Email” iCloud feature is a different thing, can be done independently of a SIWA flow (you can just go into settings and make more addresses, all it needs is a name and a notes field) and uses @icloud.com in order to make your anonymized email address look indistinguishable from other iCloud users.

The former is “filterable”, yes, but it’s moot because you only get those if you offer Sign In With Apple in the first place, and if you want real emails, you would already know to just… not do that.

The latter is very much not filterable.

The confusing thing though, is that when a user uses Sign In With Apple, they are offered two options: “share my email” which gives the site your real address, and “hide my email” which gives an @private.appleid.com address. But this “hide my email” option is a totally different thing from the separate “hide my email” service, which lets you make arbitrarily many @icloud.com private aliases to forward to your real address. Critically, the latter toplevel Hide My Email feature works with sites that don’t use Sign In With Apple. It’s just stupidly unfortunate that Apple calls both of these features “hide my email.”

Others have addressed the validity of your comment, but I’d like to discuss another aspect. Even if it is filter, I think most people would not want to filter. Apple makes it very easy to use private relay and many people that buy Apple products do use private relay. Even if you know, it’s a private relay email address, surely you want a user who buys expensive technology products to use your website in almost all circumstances.

It won't. The news here is that it won't.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

A lot of places also don't really like icloud addresses in general. This is one of Apple's better offerings though.

I think the post is very explicit. First sentence:

> Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

How many sign ups you have with an @icloud.com address?

A lot of those are Hide My Email aliases that, by design, you can’t tell apart from real human addresses.

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