During the last WWDC21, Apple featured plenty of privacy news for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey. One of them, within the iCloud + package, is the ability to receive mail without having to give our real address. A feature that although at first glance seems the most interesting, when viewed up close, reveals surprising details about the attention Apple has given to this useful feature.
A specific address for each subscription
Signing up on certain websites with your personal messaging can be considered an almost risky sport. The amount of commercials, promotions and the like that can end up reaching the borders of the inbox all too often is absurd. With this in mind, several temporary messaging services have come out that we allows you to create a random address
With Hide my email, Apple has modified these temporary emails to make it a very interesting tool for managing subscriptions and at the same time keeping our inbox clean. The system is very well integrated into the system, so much so that Safari itself offers us to create an address if you detect that an e-mail is requested from us.
Several addresses that we can deactivate or delete at our discretion.
Both automatically from Safari or by going to Settings we can create random email addresses. All the incoming mail to these addresses will appear in our inboxYes, without the sender knowing our personal address. One of the cool things here is that they all end up in @ icloud.com, so they can’t be blacklisted on sites to prevent their use. For each address we need to assign a name and we can add notes for where and how we use that specific address.
Addresses don’t expire, we can use them whenever we want until, if we want, we turn them off. If we turn them off, we will stop receiving mail sent
What if I have to send an email?
Look at the sender of an email, in this case Netflix, received via Hide my email from iOS 15.
When we respond, we will do it at this address, the message will be received on Apple’s servers and delivered to Netflix from our alias, without revealing our real address. pic.twitter.com/0ohq4MwFle
– David Bernal Raspall (@ david_br8) July 5, 2021
This is the question many of us are asking ourselves when we present this feature. At first glance Looks like Hide my mail is a service that only allows entry
When we receive an email using Hide My Email, Apple’s servers receive this email and send it to us. They send it to us in such a way that if we respond to said email, it is, once again, Apple’s servers that receive it and they deliver it to the recipient on behalf of our temporary address.
This means that while we cannot send emails from a temporary address, a feature reserved for iCloud aliases, we can respond to those received without having to reveal our real address. A detail that was not discussed during the WWDC and that we will certainly appreciate in more than one circumstance.
It’s clear that Apple has thought of all the details when developing the Hide My Email feature. Although it is not allowed to send emails directly from the addresses we create, in particular to avoid abuse of the service, we can respond to messages in a completely transparent way knowing that our real address is well protected.