You Won’t Understand How Valuable Hide My Email is Until You Use It

 

You Won’t Understand How Valuable Hide My Email is Until You Use It

I already have over twenty Hide My Email addresses and growing

Anthony Lawrence

PRIVACY

Screenshot by Author

The screenshot above shows the latest addition to my growing set of Hide My Email addresses.

There are two kinds of Hide My Email:

Sign In with Apple is for signing up for apps and services and is free. You can use your Apple ID or have them give you a Hide My Email address. However, websites have to implement this; you cannot use it if they have not.

If you have a paid iCloud account, even the minimum 99 cents per month plan, you can create these email addresses whenever you want and use them anywhere, including sites that do not support Sign In with Apple.

If you still only have the free iCloud, it’s time to change that. For 99 cents a month you get Private Relay, 50GB of storage, Hide My Email, Custom Email Domain, and HomeKit Secure Video support for one camera. Other tiers offer even more.

I’ve used these addresses with numerous websites that offer “free” information in exchange for your email. After I get whatever I was after, I disable the address. I also use them wherever I’m not sure that I trust the site not to sell my email to mass marketers. As that is almost anyone today, I’ll be using this more often and disable them if they do start to attract spam,

Disabling a Hide My Email address doesn’t kill it — you can come back later to reenable it. While disabled, anyone trying to send to that address will get a bounce back.

As most sites provide some mechanism to change your email, I am thinking that I ought to change some of those to these privacy addresses as well.

If enabled, the email will be sent to your “personal email address”. As far as I can tell, that’s your Apple ID and I don’t see any way to change that. You could, of course, forward your Apple ID address somewhere else, but it seems odd to me that you can’t override the address. When I worked at an Apple store after retiring, I regularly talked to people who did not use their Apple ID for email —some didn’t even remember that it once was an email they had used! In fairness, these were also people who didn’t use iCloud for anything, probably were not backed up at all, and barely used their phones other than to talk to people.

When an email arrives using a Hide My address, you will see that it is addressed to Hide My Email and if you click on that, you’ll see which address was used. You could block the specific sender or go disable the Hide My Email address entirely if you are being flooded with unwanted mail.

I think it would be nice if Apple had an option to reject mail from all except the domain you originally intended it for. Admittedly, this could sometimes be difficult as some sites send from a different email domain than their website, but it would not be impossible at all.

What do you think about Hide My Email? Let me know in the comments or, if you have subscribed to receive these posts by email, you can respond privately from your mailbox.

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