I've noticed a chilling new trend of apple listening to the community.

VCFundedGenYer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My guess is Ternus is starting to take more and more control. Tim was pretty absent and phoning it in the past few years.

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nate 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone have a theory why this even made it to this point? the switch was such obviously a bad idea. just corporate weirdness that no one there bothered to raise their hand and be like "uh, are we really doing this?" or was there a story here that anyone knows about?

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jofzar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's email reputation, it the always the answer with this kind of stuff.

My guess is that the bounce rate got too high and bot farms were using iCloud addresses like this.

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Marsymars 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The bounce rate of what, exactly?

Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design.

Whenever I start getting spam at an address that's been leaked, I deactivate it. I've done the same with my oldest gmail account, but the work required there is notably higher.

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MBCook 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues.

Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private one. So it’s not like they were “camouflaged.“

It’s a little odd they’re switching the subdomain though.

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int_19h 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay.

I couldn't. "Uses Apple products" is one of the more reliable signals of willingness and ability to spend money on stuff online.

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drdexebtjl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. There’s no easy-to-check pattern.

They’re not switching the subdomain. They’re keeping it the same. That’s the news.

They’re switching the subdomain for the “Sign in with Apple” sign ups, which is not the same service.

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jtbayly 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hide My Email already uses plain old @iCloud.com as the domain.

They are not changing the subdomain. There isn’t one. The announcement is they are leaving it as-is.

The email addresses for sign-in with Apple do use the @private.iCloud.com subdomain, but again, that’s not a change.

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Marsymars 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, but I'm asking "what bounce issues?"

Like for my usage there are no bounce issues with the ~400 legitimate providers that I have Hide My Email addresses from. The only ones with bounce issues are the spammers who've acquired leaked addresses that I've deactivated.

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saurik 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penalize senders the way, say, Google would if they see you sending a ton of email to their domains and they all bounce -- but people tend to use services to help send email and centrally pool their reputation (such as mailchimp) and so these services themselves then watch the bounce rate of their individual customers and either charge them more or ban their access due to the bounce rate increase.

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xp84 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Is Apple really stupid enough that they BOUNCE emails after you deactivate, rather than just silent discard? What's the point of bouncing unwanted emails these days? It's not like these bounces go to humans who go "Oh, gee! This address must not work. Allow me to go and figure out how to contact him!" It's just a stream of full-on spam with completely fake return addresses, and crap from email campaign software.

	▲	Marsymars 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean my hope is to get the senders' IP/accounts/email reputation flagged for having additional bounces.

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super256 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe hidemyemail allows easily creating many accounts on a site. And some big site didn't like it.

The "Sign-up via Apple" button and creating an iCloud email yourself have a slightly higher barrier than creating a new throwaway hidemyemail email (1 API call w/o captcha/phone verification or whatever).

We might find out later this year if some site starts blocking @icloud.com but keeps allowing @private.icloud.com.

	▲	pests 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It does, and I know a friend of a friend who uses them for Walmart accounts to bot pokemon drops. Those and office aliases.

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cush 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmm it’s almost as if people are paying good money for iCloud+ or something. They aren’t google and shouldn’t be retiring their services as if they’re giving them away for free

	▲	herpdyderp 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		While I applaud this specific change, Apple has been known to stick to their guns and I used to believe they were almost always in the right for doing so because it led to better outcomes. So my take is that it's chilling because Apple has so lost their way that they can't figure out these obviously stupid directions internally before making a fool of themselves to the public (and I agree with that take).