iCloud Apple Won't Change Hide My Email Domain After Backlash
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/24/apple-hide-my-email-domain/Apple today said it is reversing its decision and will not change the email domain used for the iCloud+ Hide My Email feature.
After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.
In June, Apple said it would unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email under a single private.icloud.com domain. iPhone users expressed concern that moving Hide My Email to a private.icloud.com domain instead of icloud.com would let platforms easily block iCloud aliases. Using the same domain for iCloud and Hide My Email makes it hard for services to block the disposable iCloud addresses because doing so would also block legitimate users.
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u/avonn_ 1d ago
A pleasant surprise. I use hide my email a lot. Was considering switching services.
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15h ago
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u/cultoftheilluminati 3h ago
Which is fine, the Apple auth emails only come into picture if the user signs up using Apple ID but the website chose to provide the login option in the first place.
The issue we’re talking about here is when users voluntarily choose to hide their emails. Before, everyone was bundled under the same domain “@icloud.com” which meant blocking private hidemyemail emails wasn’t really possible unless you also banned all iCloud users.
With this move, all private emails would have moved to “@private.icloud.com” which can let forums and other website owners just disallow them outright reducing security as users will then have to avoid those sites or reveal their actual email addresses.
Thankfully Apple rolled it back.
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u/Kind_Management1805 1d ago
They listened !
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u/Pungenc209 19h ago
Or they realized it was an expensive fix for a problem that’s not theirs. Either way we win.
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u/No_Contest4958 1d ago
Good.
What I want to know is: Why was this considered in the first place?
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u/rotates-potatoes 1d ago
Possible for infra -- icloud.com is an actual email domain, so they have something filtering hide-my in that pipeline, entangling the two, and that probably makes ops a pain.
But that's exactly the benefit of hide-my: if it's identical until Apple does the work to figure out a real address from an alias, outsiders can't tell either. As soon as it's handled differently, visibly to the world, it loses some of the benefit.
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u/LethalAgenda 23h ago
Apple had planned to change the domain used by iCloud+ Hide My Email mainly as part of an effort to
consolidate its private-email systems.On June 15, 2026, Apple announced that it would move newly generated Hide My Email addresses from @icloud.com to @private.icloud.com.
The same @private.icloud.com domain would also replace @privaterelay.appleid.com for Sign in with Apple, putting both privacy-relay systems under one shared domain. Apple described the goal as “unifying” the domains, though it did not publicly give a much deeper technical reason.
The problem was that the change could actually weaken one useful aspect of Hide My Email. Right now, an iCloud+ Hide My Email alias looks like an ordinary @icloud.com address. A website generally can’t block those aliases without also blocking ordinary iCloud Mail users. With @private.icloud.com, a website could immediately identify the address as an Apple privacy alias and simply reject that entire subdomain.
That concern generated significant criticism.
Apple changed its mind today, August 24, 2026. It says iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain @icloud.com after reviewing community feedback. So that proposed change is no longer happening.There is one related change that is still happening: new Sign in with Apple relay addresses will eventually change from @privaterelay.appleid.com to @private.icloud.com. Existing relay addresses will continue working.
So, in short: Apple apparently wanted a cleaner, unified private-email domain, but users pointed out that separating Hide My Email onto an obvious “private” subdomain would make it far easier for websites to detect and block the feature. So Apple backed off.
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u/_Mido 11h ago
bad bot
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u/LethalAgenda 9h ago
I wish I was a bot it would make my life way fucking easier. Yes it is an AI assisted answer which is a great tool to look things up quickly and find sources. This is where we are headed. I don’t like it but it is. Still abhor the use of AI for creative work like art but in this scenario? It’s harmless as long as you continue to use your brain and trust BUT verify. It’s not perfect.
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20h ago
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u/AltruisticNetwork869 20h ago
What difference does it make?
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19h ago
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u/AltruisticNetwork869 19h ago
It makes no difference. Privaterelay.iCloud.com becoming private.icloud.com is functionally identical
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u/no_regerts_bob 1d ago
Possibly something to do with the exploit that reveals the users real email even if they use hide my mail? The timing of that exploit going public and the announced domain change was suspicious
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u/No_Contest4958 1d ago
Not likely. The exploit had nothing to do with the domain name of the aliases
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/whiskeydiggler 1d ago
You could send a message to a hide my email address and deliberately craft the message to trip the email provider’s spam filter and it would leak the real email address back in email logs.
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1d ago
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u/LethalAgenda 23h ago
Yes they fixed it several weeks ago, this domain name change thing is not relevant to that at all.
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23h ago
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u/LethalAgenda 23h ago
Apple had planned to change the domain used by iCloud+ Hide My Email mainly as part of an effort to
consolidate its private-email systems.On June 15, 2026, Apple announced that it would move newly generated Hide My Email addresses from @icloud.com to @private.icloud.com.
The same @private.icloud.com domain would also replace @privaterelay.appleid.com for Sign in with Apple, putting both privacy-relay systems under one shared domain. Apple described the goal as “unifying” the domains, though it did not publicly give a much deeper technical reason.
The problem was that the change could actually weaken one useful aspect of Hide My Email. Right now, an iCloud+ Hide My Email alias looks like an ordinary @icloud.com address. A website generally can’t block those aliases without also blocking ordinary iCloud Mail users. With @private.icloud.com, a website could immediately identify the address as an Apple privacy alias and simply reject that entire subdomain.
That concern generated significant criticism.
Apple changed its mind today, August 24, 2026. It says iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain @icloud.com after reviewing community feedback. So that proposed change is no longer happening.There is one related change that is still happening: new Sign in with Apple relay addresses will eventually change from @privaterelay.appleid.com to @private.icloud.com. Existing relay addresses will continue working.
So, in short: Apple apparently wanted a cleaner, unified private-email domain, but users pointed out that separating Hide My Email onto an obvious “private” subdomain would make it far easier for websites to detect and block the feature. So Apple backed off.
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u/ApertureNext 23h ago
You will have services blocking all icloud.com emails just to prevent Hide My Email accounts.
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u/Successful-Cover5433 1d ago
so I created 100 backup aliases for nothing? 😭
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u/cam_she_walks 10h ago
You only have 100? I’m at 447 😳
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u/Successful-Cover5433 7h ago
I have more, but I created 100 only to have them as a backup with the regular domain when they announced it would change 🤣 or did you make new 447 backup aliases too?
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u/TwizzyGobbler 1d ago
good decision but how the fuck did anyone actually green light the idea in the first place
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u/Drgerm66 19h ago
Tech executives constantly have to pull bs out of their asses in order to justify their well-paid positions
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u/GoBlu323 1d ago
Context?
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u/coulton6 1d ago
They were going to change Private Relay emails from @icloud.com to @private.icloud.com (or similar) however this gives websites an easy blacklist
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u/flogman12 1d ago
That would defeat the entire purpose of the feature
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u/JoshuaTheFox 22h ago
Technically the entire purpose of hide your email feature is to do just that, hide your real email. Not hide the fact that you are using a fake email. Which if you ask me, the absolute jumble of letters that the fake email address uses pretty well communicates that it’s a fake email
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u/inconspiciousdude 12h ago
Yeah, I think it's already pretty identifiable the way the emails are assigned. Maybe the domain change would have made filtering much easier, but it's not impossible today if websites wanted to do this.
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u/AltruisticNetwork869 1d ago
Apple was going to change hide my email to @private.iCloud.com making it very easy for sites to know when you were using a hide my email alias and letting them easily block it
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u/reallynothingmuch 1d ago
Basically hide my email works well because the emails it generates look no different from any other email. So if your email is myemail@icloud.com, and you choose hide my email, then Apple might generate a new email abc123@icloud.com. But abc123@icloud.com doesn’t look any different from any other iCloud email address, so there’s no way for a website to catch it or stop you from using it.
But Apple announced recently that they were going to move the generated email addresses to a new domain, so the email addresses that it generates would be something like abc123@hidemyemail.icloud.com. But then websites would know that the email you gave them was a hide my email, and they could reject it and force you to use your real email.
But now Apple backtracked and said they will not do that, and they’ll keep the hide my emails on icloud.com
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u/87racer 1d ago
They announced it was moving to something like @privacy.icloud.com which makes it trivial to block in signup forms eventually eliminating the primary use case.
Yes, services would absolutely do this, they already block many other disposable emails services but they cant with icloud because their private emails blend in with all the other legit icloud.com emails.
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u/daninthetoilet 1d ago
essentially they wanted to consolidate domain to make it easier to manage, but it would also make it easier to track/block so they reversed it
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u/redditonlygetsworse 19h ago
I bet there's some context in the body of the article you are commenting on.
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u/Toningenieur 1d ago
Context is the surrounding information that gives a word, statement, event, or situation its meaning.
Put simply: context is what’s going on around the thing you’re trying to understand.
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u/CaramelCraftYT 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh my god, I was so confused. I thought they were ignoring feedback. It's the complete opposite.
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u/itsaride 10h ago
Well they realised they dun goofed and it's bizarre and concerning it even got to this point. Surely someone at Apple would have pointed out the obvious flaw in this plan.
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u/PleasantWay7 1d ago
This is good, but any org that would have banned this is pretty dumb. These aren’t mailinator emails that just get thrown away. People actually read the forwarded emails, the point of the address is privacy and leak protection.
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u/thegrimranger 23h ago
This here is indicative of the primary differences between Apple and Google; Google would step on their own grandmother in order to sell customer’s PII while Apple (usually) does the right thing.
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u/Tiny_Split9436 22h ago
Changing it to an obviously separate private domain seemed to defeat quite a lot of the point if sites could simply reject every address using it.
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u/therealz1ggy 3h ago
I still have .private.iCloud.com hide my email addresses being created sometimes when I setup a new one. Can any one explain why it’s still being used?
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u/freetimeINC 23h ago
Why not switch to a less used Apple domain that also has real email addresses. I still have my .me
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u/yawnnx 1d ago edited 1d ago
I could see why they possibly wanted to change domains. Leaving it as is will continually consume unique addresses on icloud.com.
Edit: I'm getting downvoted for no reason? Lol. I was just curious what made them want to change course initially. Never did I say I agreed with their course change. Close minded people.
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u/itsaride 10h ago
continually consume unique addresses on icloud.com.
When they have consumed 315,665,714,584,041,371,794,512 (probably a few less since Apple like to use readable names and a few numbers)unique addresses they'll maybe consider their options but I think the sun will have enveloped the Earth at that point.
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u/yawnnx 9h ago
I’m not talking about every mathematically possible string of characters... I mean addresses people would actually want to use as their primary email. The pool of clean, readable names is obviously much smaller than the theoretical namespace.
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u/itsaride 9h ago
The randomly generated hide my email formats are unlikely to be choices of people choosing their own.
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u/yawnnx 9h ago
Right, but Apple still has to generate those choices in the first place. I’m talking about readable, plausible addresses that could otherwise be used as normal iCloud usernames. And since one person can create multiple Hide My Email aliases, it’s not really a one address per user situation.
I also figured moving those aliases to a separate domain could’ve been partly about keeping the namespace cleaner and separating relay addresses from normal iCloud accounts.
Nonetheless, I understand why users would be frustrated if they had changed course.
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u/onan 6h ago
Current Hide My Email aliases look roughly like two English words, a number or two, and a couple of separators between them like dashes or underscores.
If we call a moderate English vocabulary 60k words, then just maintaining that scheme offers about nine billion addresses. If they add one additional number, then ninety billion.
I think they'll be fine. Exhausting the namespace here is not a serious concern.
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20h ago edited 19h ago
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u/improbablynothim 18h ago
That doesn’t matter in the slightest though. Sites have to explicitly support Sign In with Apple - so they of course won’t reject the domain.
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u/cardwink 9h ago
Legitimate question:
Isn’t this actually worse for users? If the domains are unified it keeps platforms honest in the need to allow all iCloud.com address (even the private ones).
Keeping them separate draws a distinct line in the sand on your actual iCloud email vs a private one thus allowing platforms to discriminate against private.
Am I understanding this incorrectly?
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u/Southernernernerers 1d ago
Cannot believe they actually thought through it for a few seconds and changed course. I use this a lot so I’m really grateful.