Tell HN: Stop using Apple's Hide My Email, its a one-way street

2 points by rvalue 1 year ago | 13 comments

This post is a shocking realisation of a simple bug in Apple's Hide My Email(HME) feature. You simply cannot send an email.

Since Apple has done the marketing as such that with a click of a button, it will create a unique email address for any business you want to sign up with, I doubt many would think twice because its all so simple and Apple way of a solution, sure, why not, let's use HME everywhere to protect your privacy and if you feel the business is not respecting your preferences, you settle out any bills with them and deactivate the email address given to them.

But what if you are working with a business with strict email policy and no other way to contact them, how do you file a ticket with them? How do you email them?

Let me point you to this support article where Apple still doesn't point out the glaring truth of HME that you simply cannot send an email with a previously generated email address

https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/icloud/mm9d9012c9e8/icloud

When you use HME on a website (for e.g. business.com), you can check on your Mac that the HME generated for the website, on the top it will say Safari and in the label will be the domain name of the business(business.com). Let's call the email generated by HME as hme-1@icloud.com.

Now if you were to use the Mac app or iCloud Mail to compose a message to support@business.com and choose HME as the sender, it will not populate hme-1@icloud.com, it will be just another random address like hme-99@icloud.com. It does not take into account that since hme-1@icloud.com has been assigned/mapped to business.com, the Apple user should technically be able to send email to any email address of business.com like admin@business.com or techsupport@business.com or sales@business.com.

It would have made sense for Apple to say, if the Apple user was trying to send an email to sales@sales.business.com, of course we won't let you send that email because the sales user belongs to sales.business.com domain, not business.com domain for which we have assigned hme-1@icloud.com to you.

I tried to explain this fundamental thing to Apple's customer support that emails are a two-way street. Just as how I am able to receive emails from any@business.com, I should also be able to send email to any@business.com.

But according to Apple, this design is as-intended.

jamesmotherway 1 year ago |

I came across this post while searching for something else.

This behavior is to mitigate the risk of abuse, plain and simple. Apple does not want ephemeral iCloud addresses sending out malicious content.

Yes, you can still theoretically do this with a regular iCloud email. However, it is rate-limited by the sign up process, which requires the threat actor to burn another email address or phone number (and a device ID, probably).

Use something like SimpleLogin instead. Even still, I find Hide My Email useful for Apple Pay, where I only receive transactional emails anyway.

drpossum 1 year ago |

You post this like there's no use case for an address that just forwards to an address or reply to emails sent to you. Apple is in fact clear that is what it does in the description. https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

> Hide My Email generates unique, random email addresses that automatically forward to your personal inbox. Each address is unique to you. You can read and respond directly to emails sent to these addresses and your personal email address is kept private.

Nothing there suggests you can generate new email threads from an address, just "respond directly". While that may not meet your needs, it does meet the needs of other use cases for which it was designed (e.g. signing up for a service you don't want to provide your true email address for). That's absolutely no reason to call for a blanket "stop using it".

rvalue 1 year ago | |

Have I not made my case with sufficient explanation?

drpossum 1 year ago | | |

No, because you didn't invalidate the cases for which it is used. People should continue using the feature if it meets their needs.

You also didn't address spam and security issues if someone is able to endlessly produce anonymous email addresses and send unprompted emails. This is almost certainly why Apple wouldn't implement this feature as you want.

lesserknowndan 1 year ago | | |

I would say yes you have.

Seeing as most transactional email from businesses is sent from a no-reply address, it would seem this is a huge oversight to not allow someway for you to email the business using that email alias.

One question though - does it allow you to respond to a previous email and add a new email address in the "to" field?

Also, I don't understand why people would disagree with you pointing this out... Are they the Apple developer who developed it and are butt-hurt that someone is pointing out a flaw? Are they an Apple investor and can't stand the idea of any negative Apple press hurting Apple's share price?

Surely it is better if any flaws in software are pointed out so that they can be addressed.

c16 1 year ago |

Apple are pretty clear this is for one way communication. It’s not an email replacement, it’s a privacy tool. There is always a trade off when it comes to privacy, and in this case it is that you can’t send email.

There are plenty of great tools out there which allow you to create multiple addresses with the ability to send. Maybe you should consider the trade offs that are acceptable to your specific use case and invest/use/setup/buy into them? You could buy a random domain and set up a catch all address if you want to keep it simple.

Before Relay was a thing I wanted to learn about SMTP and make a service which could do something very similar to what Relay ended up being but for mobile. I’m still running it ~4 years later (https://inboxesapp.com) and it’s a great learning experience. If you don’t have what you want - build it!

rvalue 1 year ago | |

No, it's not clear, thats my fundamental point. It's actually misinformation.

They call it a feature to create unique, random email addresses.... Email Addresses are for two-way communication.

If I tell you here is a device you use for instant messages. And you ask me, hey how do I send someone a message using this device? I tell you, you can't. That's because you are holding a PAGER.

2Gkashmiri 1 year ago |

i will give my 2 cents.

i use mailinabox and it works good enough for me. I can generate aliases at any limit and without any burden. Now, what you are describing is the same in mailinabox. the alias is merely a "receiving" alias. you cannot send from that.

what i found out was, how i can bypass this is by deleting the alias, then creating a new user with that email. a new email inbox is created. then you send that email whatever you want to send.

then you can delete the user and create alias once again and you are back to square one.

i know, its tedious process but it works for me. since apple probably wont let you create accounts with those disposable emails, then they should allow sending from aliases.