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Comment by k1next | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, Hide My Email is binding me to the Apple ecosystem more than iMessage (but I'm European).

It’s unsettling, you’re either an iCloud customer for life or hundreds of logins could break.

Nothing breaks when you switch. You just can't create more private icloud addresses. I recently switched back to Android and can still use my old icloud logins.

But what happen if you stop paying $1 / month?

If you cancel iCloud+, all the aliases remain active. As parent said, you just can't create more of them.

And you'll still be able to receive email send to these aliases? Even on a free-tier iCloud account?

Last I checked, yes.

Thanks, undocumented? Meanwhile reddit’s answer:

> In what universe if you stop paying for a service you can still access the resources of that service? Basic common knowledge.

But on MacRumors:

  “Update: So I let my iCloud+ account expire.

  When this happens you lose access to managing ALL your Hide My Email emails. Yet you can't even see what the Hide My Email addresses are any longer.

  But, people can still send emails to those emails. However, you apparently cannot reply to the emails with the Hide My Email address.

  This is troubling...”

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/what-happens-to-hide-my...

Does it? I use Hide My Email largely without integration to the Apple ecosystem - I generate new emails on icloud.com and copy/paste them to login forms before saving to 1Password.

Same, Hide My Email is pretty much the only Apple service I use and the aliases are only for accounts I don't really care about.

I use this wonderful extension to make it easy to generate aliases https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...

This is one reason I never used it, but another reason is that I never felt that the privacy benefits were worth the hassle of randomized emails.

If I need to make an account with someone I don't trust enough to hand my email over to, usually the right answer is to just not create an account with them.

I have also tried things like having email aliases but what ends up happening is now I have more email accounts aliases to maintain/think about. It's annoying.

I don't personally find the prospect of "receiving spam email" or "having my email account leaked in a hack" to be particularly threatening. Spam just goes to the spam box, it's usually not my problem.

And besides, my real email can get exposed by my own legitimate companies that really should have my real email getting hacked. See also: EquiFax.

Like yes that, but also. Why would I want to hide my email from someone but not from Apple? And why can’t I turn it off and choose not to hide my email? This is one of my top Apple ‘features’ that would make me migrate away, if not for android being similarly awful

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