Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email? | Hacker News Reader

Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?

lapcatsoftware.com

85 pointscdrnsf53 comments

Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.

OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.

Office apps no longer autosave unless you have OneDrive installed. So no autosave for me! Instead I save compulsively lie the days of floppy disk PCs.

(Meanwhile Emacs has had autosave since at least 1977)

Older office 2019 or 21 I think with massgrave.

Libreoffice.

I'm more and more relying less on office nowadays.

I remember when Adobe switched to default saving to your cloud profile rather than local. It took digging to get the default switched back to local. I know I'm old, but who wants to save large media files to a cloud like this? It's not like I'm working on a computer in one location, move to another computer entirely. Who sits at a computer to log out the cloud user just to login as yourself? You pop in a USB stick (or other storage) and use whatever account is logged in while saving back to the same storage medium. I know when you are a cloud SaaS, you want all the people to use all your things, but it always felt like a solution looking for a problem. That's a problem for me

Pack-in slopware and it's consequences have been a disaster for the desktop operating system duopoly.

You’re giving me ptsd of LittleSnitch + any Adobe (or microsoft) product.

You seriously can’t even use the machine without blanket, permanent approvals… the endless flood of network requests is paralyzing.

MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.

I got rid of both, not too long ago, but even trying to be careful about approving office chatter got me that read-only license check bar all the time. And getting rid of it meant clearing rules and blanket Approve for a time, or a flood of individual ones.

Also excising Adobe was not simple.

Probably Handoff and cross-device application state syncing.

Most likely answer so far. While writing an email you can take it over between iPhone, iPad and Mac. Once you hit send it probably gives a “you can stop Handoff now” signal.

I've disabled Handoff.

Also, why would Handoff be triggered by sending an email rather than composing an email? Mail app uses IMAP for syncing mailboxes.

Why would a local facility like handoff need to talk to the mother ship?

I assume for the same reason the OS pings Cupertino when you run a binary - surveillance, masquerading as protection.

Yes, the safe assumption is that Apple reads all your mail. Not that any other provider is better---most are probably worse.

I don't think they read all of it. Probably just metadata. But would be good to know what's being sent.

Assume their AI agent now file system indexer is reading all your email on their behalf.

For a company who hangs their hat on privacy, it is a dang shame that their native mail client can't support PGP/GnuPG. I mean it'll do S/MIME, but who uses that regularly.

One Apple Mail feature nobody here has commented on was called Piano Mover internally. I don’t know the public marketing name. It lets attachments over 10MB in emails be replaced with iCloud hosted file references.

I think every major email hosting provider (that's not a dumb IMAP only platform) has some variant of this.

the marketing name is "Mail Drop", and it is separate from iCloud mail; though it should only fire if there's a 20mb+ attachment on the email.

cloudd is used by a shit-ton of services though, so I'm not sure how to track it down without better tracing of what actually initiated the call, or the contents of the call.

edit: tomasf nailed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388

I wonder if "Piano Mover" is a reference to the Goon Show episode called "Napoleon’s Piano" [1]

If you like absurdly silly comedy; Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, you should track these down. These were made in the 1950's for BBC Radio.

[1] https://goonshow.org/goonshow/s6p4/

A dead comment said It's previous recipients synced over iCloud. And said how to see this.[1] Vouch it if you can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388

I think this is correct, and I've now added addendums to the blog post.

Isn't this Private Relay masking your IP? https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

The article calls out Safari but my understanding is it applies to email also.

No, I don't use Private Relay or subscribe to iCloud+

Some stats on this downranked(?) post: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49156299

Jeff Johnson is an Apple privacy information hero and deserves every penny for his apps like StopTheMadness https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness

I agree, though I don’t think it’s relevant to this post.

Fair! Hope some appreciated context around author credibility nonetheless.

Also if you care about the post and its implications, you’re the target market for the app. Course these kinds of defenses are still tangential and one could stretch annoyingly.

Why’s this post below an older less popular one? https://i.ibb.co/jnpcFJz/IMG-0549.jpg

because rankings take other things into account, such as the time of the post

Time of day? (It’s newer than a lesser commented, less voted one above - at top of screenshot.)

TIL there’s an app for that

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513

Recent Flock, BMW, iCloud stories not logged there - three I noticed. Take that robot, human took an advantage!

It's previous recipients synced over iCloud.

Run this and then send an email to see it: log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.cloudkit"' --info --debug

Verified - and the actual payload to the iCloud endpoint is e2e encrypted ciphertext.

Everyone wearing their tinfoil hat while using Gmail and drive for everything

Gmail doesn't pretend to be private.

It sure seems to.

> When you send an email or text message, send attachments, or record video meetings, it is stored securely in our world-class data centers. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. If you choose to access this data offline, we store this info on your device.

> We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en

> while using Gmail and drive for everything

I don't.

You’d be in the minority.

I'd also be the author of the submitted article.

I admire your work greatly then. I definitely appreciate uncovering this sort of telemetry, but I feel the reaction from some may be a little more Tin-foil-hatted for my taste. I do thank you for doing the work though!

I also applaud you for not using the mainstream thing. That’s good too.

I don't either. My main issue is some of my recipients are so it sadly doesn't help much.

Email needs to die.

To be replaced by what?

What alternatives do you recommend for someone trying to move away?

I have multiple email accounts. My website hosting company has email service. Fastmail is also good.

ProtonMail is not bad. iCloud works fine with imap (ie mutt, thunderbird) and does custom domains too.

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