Apple has reversed course on moving iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses to a dedicated private.icloud.com domain. Sign in with Apple is still moving there, but Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com. This does not solve email privacy; it merely preserves one relay feature in an email system that still needs reworking.

From the perspective of a service receiving a Hide My Email alias, a dedicated domain would make every such address trivial to reject with one rule. Keeping aliases on icloud.com forces the service to accept the relay, gamble on pattern matching, or risk rejecting ordinary iCloud users. A service could still try to judge an address’s “legitimacy,” but I would argue that effort is moot. Native email clients make managing multiple addresses a breeze, so any garbled address can still be a “live” address.

Hide My Email is among many other masking and relay services a user can choose. There are countless community reports comparing their reachability, documenting messages that go missing or stop reaching recipients after sudden infrastructure changes. The fact that communities are sharing their anecdotes in unison shows that reliability is not guaranteed. A relay can hide an address perfectly and still be useless if the mail cannot be trusted to arrive.

From the user’s perspective, disguise is the least important reason to want an alias. A newsletter does not need my permanent personal email address. I need a throwaway address that acts as a kill switch when a newsletter’s “Unsubscribe” button becomes meaningless. Hide My Email provides that switch on iCloud. If anonymity were the goal, a throwaway email account, not merely an alias, would serve much better.

My current band-aid solution to the email problem is a middle-man, or filter, account. From there, I can pass through only the messages I want. Think of it as a whitelisting system. The problem is timing: I cannot retroactively place that account between a service and the email address it already has.

That is where email differs from a password manager. Password managers offer a legitimate boost in creating and managing harder passwords in greater numbers than most people can memorize. The nuanced benefit most fail to realize is that services often welcome the use of password managers (read: except for a few choice Korean apps). Email changes depend on the service. I cannot guarantee retroactive removal from a mailing list, let alone the legitimacy of the list itself.

Email needs its password manager moment: a durable ledger of which service received which address, paired with routing and filtering that the user controls. I do not know what implementation could retrofit that onto decades of scattered address books and mailing lists. Until one exists, Hide My Email remains one limited tool among many. Apple’s reversal preserves the point of that tool, but it does not fix email as it exists today.