iCloud - hide my email a dream and a burden

Noah · 2022-10-17T22:36:46.619Z

Hi everyone!

If you’re not aware Apple has a feature called hide my email, this allows you to make a fake email which you can send and receive from, but then easily create and delete.

Personally, I have used this for a ton of sites to prevent spam, but I just realised this is a major tool for spammers, in seconds they can make emails to sign up to services and easily create many alternate accounts to abuse with.

In addition to this it’s almost impossible to distinguish a legitimate Apple account to a hide my email account.

At the moment we’re considering blocking the iCloud domain, but this would be very unfortunate for those with genuine iCloud accounts, what do you think we should do?

OH20_rbLX · 2022-10-17T23:33:00.195Z

You’re indeed correct.

Although the hidden email feature on iCloud can be used for good intentions, scammers can easily abuse it as it’s technically available to anybody who has payed for the subscription.

However, the same case goes for other hidden email tools, such as Firefox Relay (I made a post on it before), and several other sites.

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth blocking the iCloud domain, as it’s unlikely scammers will chose to use it in the first place because it’s a payed feature, compared to free email hiding tools on the internet. Apple has also invested a lot into the security of iCloud, which makes it even less likely for scammers to consider iClould email address hiding as their first choices.

peter · 2022-10-17T23:34:40.864Z

OH20_rbLX:

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth blocking the iCloud domain, as it’s unlikely scammers will chose to use it in the first place because it’s a payed feature, compared to free email hiding tools on the internet.

I agree with this. There’s no real point to blocking iCloud as most spammers wouldn’t really want to go as far as to pay for iCloud+ to attack a small(ish) site.

25swrld · 2022-10-18T07:29:11.712Z

You would be surprised on how common this is.

It has caused lots of destruction to the forums which is why were considering blocking it

25swrld · 2022-10-18T07:57:12.778Z

OH20_rbLX:

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth blocking the iCloud domain, as it’s unlikely scammers will chose to use it in the first place because

It has been used before which is why we’re considering blocking it,

peter · 2022-10-18T15:22:38.749Z

But if you block iCloud, there’s still 10minutemail which has around 500 domains.

25swrld · 2022-10-18T16:41:32.660Z

Yeah but those can be blocked as they use similar subdomains

Noah · 2022-10-18T20:47:30.929Z

In addition to that is there are genuine iCloud domains, we’ll see what we do, but it isn’t looking good for the icloud domain.

OH20_rbLX · 2022-10-18T21:00:39.241Z

I see. If that’s the case I would say blocking the iCloud domain would be a good move, maybe you can create a poll to get opinions from the community too.

Noah · 2022-10-19T20:56:58.278Z

Do you think we should block the icloud domain?

Yes
No

0 voters

Jessica · 2022-10-20T09:56:33.399Z

should we make a petition for apple to limit this feature to users (to prevent spam)?

Yes
Unsure
No

0 voters

Noah · 2022-10-20T20:26:57.981Z

It’s a 50 - 50 vote, hard to tell.