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Apple Reverses Hide My Email Domain Change

Community feedback led Apple to keep Hide My Email aliases on icloud.com to prevent easy domain-level blocking.

Overview

  • Apple said in a developer update Monday that iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will stay on the icloud.com domain after reviewing community feedback about the planned change.
  • The company will still move Sign in with Apple addresses to private.icloud.com later this year and told developers to accept private.icloud.com alongside privaterelay.appleid.com.
  • Existing Sign in with Apple relay addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to forward mail without interruption, Apple said.
  • Hide My Email works by issuing unique @icloud.com aliases that forward to a user’s real inbox, and moving those aliases to a single private.icloud.com domain would have made them easy for sites to detect and block.
  • Earlier reporting found a Hide My Email bug that leaked users’ real addresses when messages were rejected as spam, a flaw Apple later fixed, which helped sharpen scrutiny of any domain or implementation changes and prompted caution from developers and admins.