I use Apple's "Hide My Email" feature virtually every time an app asks me for an email address. I almost never share my actual email, unless I really trust the company or service asking for it or know it'll make my life easier in the long run. (If you've ever tried confirming a Hide My Email alias with a customer service rep, you know what I mean.)
If you're like me, you might have noticed some headlines earlier this summer about Apple's plans to reduce Hide My Email's efficacy. This was true, and, as designed, Apple's changes would have made it more likely that users would share their real email addresses whenever they signed up for services. But luckily, Apple is now cancelling those plans.
If you aren't familiar with this privacy tool, here's the gist: If you have an iCloud+ subscription, Hide My Email generates email "aliases" that forward messages to your real email address. You can use these aliases anywhere you would normally use your actual email, retaining some anonymity without sacrificing the convenience of using a single inbox.
Let's say you're signing up for a new account somewhere. Rather than use your real email address when asked, you can use Hide My Email to generate a unique, random address—something like "[email protected]" (seriously, they really look like this). As silly as the aliases can be, they're invaluable for preserving your privacy: Any messages sent to these aliases will forward to your actual inbox. You'll receive the email as if someone sent it to your real address, without ever actually exposing your address to the contact. What's more, if that alias is ever compromised, you can shut it down without affecting your actual email address. Win-win.
How Apple planned to make Hide My Email worse
This system has been working for years without issue. So, naturally, Apple planned on making things worse. Back in June, we learned the company had prepped to unify its "Hide My Email" alias domains with "Sign in with Apple" domains. If you've ever used Sign in with Apple—the feature that lets you sign up for services with your Apple Account—you may know the feature generates privaterelay.appleid.com domains for your account address. Per Apple, both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email would use private.icloud.com domains. In the example above, your email alias would be "[email protected]" instead of "[email protected]."
From Apple's perspective, this would simplify its processes, keeping both of its privacy login features tied to the same domain. But for the rest of us, it would break Hide My Email a bit. The original design ensures that your Hide My Email alias cannot be distinguished from a standard iCloud email. While a human might see [email protected] and know something's odd, a system will only know that the email address is a valid @icloud.com address. As such, it treats the alias as any other iCloud email, and lets you through. The new domain, however, signals to anyone (or any system) that your email address is actually an alias. Companies could potentially block @private.icloud.com domains from signing up for services, defeating the purpose of Hide My Email entirely.
Apple had said existing Hide My Email domains would continue to operate normally, so your old aliases would carry on fine. But once the planned changes were supposed to take effect, new aliases would run the risk of failure. I would begrudgingly continue using the feature if most companies and services didn't end up treating @private.icloud.com addresses any differently from a typical domain. But if it becomes commonplace to block these Hide My Email aliases, that would change things.
Fortunately, we don't need to worry about this anymore. On Monday, Apple issued an update, informing users that Hide My Email will remain on the iCloud.com domain. The update was brief, but Apple did say that the reversal came after "further consideration and reviewing community feedback," suggesting that the public outcry had an impact on this decision.
Unfortunately for Apple, this wasn't the only Hide My Email controversy to land this summer. In July, we learned that Hide My Email had a security flaw that could leak your actual email address to bad actors—defeating the purpose of the feature entirely. A security researcher reported the flaw to Apple back in June of 2025, and while the company said it was working to fix it, the flaw persisted through this year. 404 Media initially broke the story, and, about three weeks later, Apple implemented a fix. As it stands, the feature should be secure, and should now continue to work as usual, but it's been a tough summer for Hide My Email.
Email alias alternatives you can use instead
It isn't an issue now that Hide My Email isn't changing, but if you've decided you've had it with Apple, there are email alias alternatives out there you can try. Proton Mail, for example, has its own version of the feature, and while it requires a paid subscription for unlimited aliases, you can generate 10 for free. DuckDuckGo has its own version too, called Email Protection, which generates aliases using the domain @duck.com. Mozilla has an option in Firefox Relay, which also works with phone numbers.
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