Apple will not move its Hide My Email addresses to a new domain, reversing a change announced in June that iCloud+ subscribers said would have made the privacy feature easier for websites to detect and reject.
The company disclosed the reversal in an Aug. 24 developer update. Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com. Apple said the decision followed further consideration and a review of community feedback, and did not elaborate.
Hide My Email is a paid iCloud+ feature that generates a unique, disposable address for each website or service. Mail sent to the alias forwards to the subscriber’s real inbox, which is never disclosed to the sender. Users can deactivate or delete individual addresses at any time.
Because the aliases use the same icloud.com domain as standard iCloud accounts, receiving systems cannot distinguish a masked address from a conventional one by domain alone. Blocking the aliases at the domain level would also block ordinary iCloud users. In June, Apple said it would consolidate Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple under a single private.icloud.com domain. Users on social media and Reddit said a segregated domain would let platforms turn away aliases at signup.
The Sign in with Apple portion of the plan is proceeding. Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses will be issued on private.icloud.com rather than privaterelay.appleid.com. Existing privaterelay.appleid.com addresses will continue to forward without interruption. Apple told developers to ensure their account systems, email validation logic and allowlists accept private.icloud.com in addition to privaterelay.appleid.com.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who first reported the reversal, wrote that Apple employees had objected to the domain change from the outset.
Apple retains the ability to identify the account behind a masked address in response to law enforcement requests.
The reversal follows a separate Hide My Email problem reported this summer. 404 Media reported in July that messages rejected as spam could expose the real address behind an alias. A security researcher had disclosed the flaw to Apple in June 2025. Apple issued a fix roughly three weeks after the report was published, more than a year after it was first notified.
Other providers offer comparable masking tools. Proton Mail includes an alias feature with 10 free addresses and unlimited aliases on paid plans. DuckDuckGo operates Email Protection, which issues addresses on duck.com. Mozilla’s Firefox Relay masks email addresses and phone numbers.
