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Comment by DIVx0 | Hacker News Reader

I would really love to see an official "hide my email" extension from Apple. I use this feature so much that I go out of my way to use it since I don't use Safari and that's the only integration for HME.

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I have the same feature using 1Password and Fastmail. https://1password.com/fastmail/

Bonus is that I use a separate subdomain of my custom domain for disposable email addresses which means it never fails email checks (some don't like disposable/temporary email domains).

Doesn’t seem like a bonus. Your custom domain could just be blocked wholesale. Hide my email uses iCloud, not a separate domain. iCloud addresses probably won’t be blocked as that’s the default email given for hundred million plus Apple accounts.

Fastmail by default uses @fastmail.com addresses for masked email, same as their cheapest plan, so when I used it there was never anything blocked except the occasional site that only accepts gmail addresses (yep, they exist). Personally I prefer it that way for personal use, the custom domain sacrifices anonymity, but it might be nice for business users.

A while ago I ran into the first site that told me I couldn't use my fastmail masked email: remove.bg. I don't know if they block every fastmail.com address, or if they somehow check if it's a masked email.

Fastmail is still like 0.1% of users. If you're a "growth & engagement" company you're probably better off banning that domain wholesale and as a bonus will get rid of tech-savvy ad/tracker blocker users without making any impact to your target market.

The advantage of iCloud is that it's a domain laymen use - those same laymen the "growth & engagement" scum wants to track and spam. They can't just ban it wholesale without alienating a large chunk of their target market (and a pretty lucrative one at that, since Apple hardware is expensive).

This is a plus, I’ve noticed the duck.com addresses from DDG are already blocked heavily.

Really? Where have you noticed this?

Lots of random weirdness for me trying to use mine. Most recent example was trying to checkout as a guest on Little Caesar’s app. Kept declining my Apple Pay transaction without telling me why — changed the email and it worked.

There’s only been a handful of times I’ve used it, maybe 12? At least a few of those times it wouldn’t even let me submit it saying it was an “invalid email”. Couldn’t even get past the validation.

Any idea if using a custom domain would have worked better here? I wouldn't be surprised if some places only accept email addresses from a small set of "known" providers

Custom Domains work fine, that’s my primary email. Doesn’t do much for privacy though.

Any website that uses a library such as this one: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/micke/valid_email2/master/...

Was hoping to find an an iCloud email in your profile but instead found this:

> humanity will go extinct March 11th, 2401

Please explain! Citation required :) /s

Nobody is going to care enough about your domain to block it individually.

Blocking domains that aren't iCloud, gmail, etc would mean blocking business users. Do you know of any services doing that?

> Do you know of any services doing that?

Microsoft, Google, Apple

Microsoft and Apple allow custom domain names in MSA and Apple IDs. I have them for both.

I do believe Google requires Workspace to have a custom domain, though.

I have a custom domain on simplelogin (protonmail purchased them) that is occasionally blocked (github openai etc are recent examples).

I suspect they validate by looking up the MX record and block it based on the entry containing simplelogin.co

Companies blocking disposable email domains are doing it to prevent many users from using their service with a disposable email.

A custom domain that only I use specifically for disposable emails would look indistinguishable from any other custom domain out there, and nobody else would have used it for them to even be aware of its existence.

To block it pre-emptively, they’d have to either be omniscient or block every single custom domain in existence. The former I highly doubt is the case, the latter would generally do more harm than good to them.

I used to use an MX record that had mailinator handle nospam.jrock.us email addresses... but stopped doing it for anonymity reason. ("whois nospam.jrock.us" whoops there's my home address!)

The alternative I currently use is letting Gmail handle the spam. I used to be big into jon-foo@jrock.us for "foo" and that sort of thing, but every address ended up on every spam list anyway, and the filtering didn't increase the signal to noise ratio.

For true throwaways I just use mailinator. If I want to receive email from someone someday, I can just create another account. If they spam me, Google will filter it out. So it goes.

Just fyi details on domains haven't been publicly available for several years now

.us domains don’t have Whois protection.

You use jon-foo-randomchars@example.com because then you can be sure where the address was leaked from and which companies are selling your email address, and to provide additional signal to the spam filter. If you use just jon-foo@, then that's guessable and you can't go off on them for selling your email address when they said they wouldn't.

It’s bonkers to me that 1Password hasn’t rolled out a first-party forwarding service yet. It’s the one thing iCloud Keychain has on them.

Not official, but this one generally works great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-hide-my-ema...

There’s also this nifty shortcut that works for both iOS and macOS: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/6b0c16ff0dfb4814bd881112354...

Not really an Apple guy but this[0] came up first and its open source, have you seen it?

[0]: https://github.com/dedoussis/icloud-hide-my-email-browser-ex...

I generated a “hide my email” forwarding address specifically for my HN profile last weekend.

Not via a chrome extension, but it’s pretty easy to generate one on any Mac (maybe even iOS?) in system settings. You can name the forwarding address to have different ones for different uses

Edit: re-read your comment and sounds like you’re already doing this manually, like me. I agree it’s a hassle and would love to see a more native UX that doesn’t involve opening system settings

Shameless plug: I've built the unofficial "Hide My Email" browser extension [0], available both in Firefox [1] and Chromium [2]. Tried to make it as frictionless as the Safari UX, which proved to be a challenge given the lack of native HME APIs.

[0] https://github.com/dedoussis/icloud-hide-my-email-browser-ex...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-hide-m...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-hide-my-ema...

Same for Apple Pay. Given that I mostly buy thing on my computer, and that I don't use Safari there, I basically never use it, even though I would really prefer it over entering/auto-filling my card number.

I’ll actually switch to safari explicitly for sure that support it because Apple Pay just makes it so easy/quick to buy things without accounts

Apple’s Hide-my-email service is only useful to people who don’t have their own domain-name for email. I assume most of here on HM have a vanity dot-com or dot-me that we just point to GMail (or maybe Office 365 if you lean that way) - all those services (not to mention self-hosted) allow us to set arbitrary, catch-all, and disposable addresses (even the perpetually un-cool O365 supports it now too).

I’ll never use Apple’s Hide-my-email service until they let us use it with our own domain-names. It’s my email mailbox and my dodgy account registration, not Apple’s.

I wouldn’t say it’s only useful for people without vanity domain names - it also adds a level anonymity should the user database get leaked (IE: it’ll be a random HME account that will look like every other, vs your specific domain name)

Also FWIW you can use it with custom domains - I use it with fastmail and have since day one (their version of it isn’t as tightly integrated as Apple but they offer this service as well). Hope this helps!

> Also FWIW you can use it with custom domains

To confirm, you're saying that Apple will generate something like "randomString@yourDomainName.com"? If so, how can I set that up? I don't see any relevant settings on my phone's iCloud settings page.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-custom-email-d...

That document says in roder to do that you need to migrate to using iCloud Mail - oh well.

Hide my email is useful for avoiding linking accounts to a common identifier.

SimpleLogin is much more featured and supports extensions on all major platforms.

Oh man, I use that a lot.

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