When Apple introduced the iCloud + Hide My Mail service at last year’s WWDC, I cheered. The way to make my inbox completely spam-free, improve the security of all accounts and at the same time protect my privacy as much as possible had just arrived. Shortly after its release, the the email address of all my accounts, services and subscriptions was different.
Three reasons: privacy, spam and security
Before we get into the how, let’s talk about the why. There are three main reasons for thanks to iCloud+ and for the Hide My Mail service, use different addresses for different services and subscriptions.
The first reason is confidentiality. Because all addresses are different, no one can match accounts. Neither the service nor anyone outside can know if I have a Disney+ and Netflix account, because the identification, the e-mail, is different. Finding a comment in a forum, for example, checking mail and searching for that person on LinkedIn or Twitter is no longer possible.
The second reason is to remove spam completely. I have always been very careful not to give out my personal email. Since they introduced I used multiple iCloud aliases to never reveal my Apple ID. The reason is that I can’t edit the Apple ID email because it ends in @icloud.com, so if it fell prey to spam, I couldn’t do much. So over the years I’ve used different aliases, one for personal use and one for subscriptions.
I always had peace of mind that if I ever started getting too much spam I could undo the alias and create a new one, but the worry of having to change the address for every service means I tolerate a some degree of spam. Now with Hide My Mail addresses, disabling one of them and changing it to a single service is much easier
The net result of all of this is that my account is completely spam free. And that by using many more services. Before it would never have occurred to me to give my email so they could send me a newsletter, now with the peace of mind of being able to deactivate the address I move in a different way . I know I won’t have to look for the gray “here” button inside the phrase “If you don’t want to receive any more mail, click here”, if there is one. I know that I go to my Apple ID settings and unsubscribe with one click
Unsubscribing from a work email is as simple as deactivating the address, nothing more.
The last reason, closely related to the first, is security. I use two-factor authentication on all accounts that offer it, but there are too many services that don’t give me this option. With this, we are talking about account security having a lot to do with secrecy. Of course, all my passwords are different, but now a potential attacker would have to guess the email address of a service before even considering attempting a brute force or phishing attack.
And how can I have different addresses? Very easy. As we said before, thanks to Hide My Mail. With this service we can create an address in which receive all the messages you want, reply to as many messages as you want and all without ever giving your real address.
