How to hide your email from everyone on the internet

If you subscribe to Apple’s iCloud+ service, you have access to a very cool and very underrated feature – Hide My Email.

Why would I want to hide my email?

If you’ve paid attention to news you’ve probably heard about data leaks. Big corporations are targeted by hackers and unfortunately mistakes happen and sometimes hackers get access to companies’ databases, often containing the personal information of customers.

Depending on where the leak happens this personal information can be harmless or pretty severe. The past data leaks we’ve seen in the US have included customer names, passwords, home addresses, social security numbers, and credit card numbers. I’ve been a part of a data leak myself and it’s a very unpleasant feeling knowing someone clicked a sketchy link that allowed the bad guys to get into their systems and steal sensitive information, violating your privacy.

So the less information you give to the people and companies you’re doing business with, the better it’s for your privacy. That’s why Hide My Email is a good tool.

Hide My Email will do a lot of heavy lifting in the background to create unique random email addresses for everyone you interact with – whether that’s simply sending emails to people or using your email address to sign up for websites and services. If your email is something like walterwhite@icloud.com (I’m a big Breaking Bad fan and I’m not sure if there’s a Walter White somewhere using this email, if there is, I’m sorry) Hide My Email will change it to something that looks more or less like “afshdgklfdg-oh6@icloud.com”. Your iCloud settings will store a list of these temporary “fake” email addresses where you can control how forwarding is done or delete the temporary addresses if you don’t want to use them anymore.

Hiding your email when sending emails

When sending emails from your iCloud account using Apple’s Mail app you have an option to either use your real email address, or to hide your email. Hiding your email doesn’t tell the recipient that you’re covering your personal email address, they’ll simply see an email coming from a random iCloud.com address. And if they respond to that email, they’ll response will come directly into your inbox with a notification that the email was forwarded by Hide My Mail.

Hiding your email when signing up for websites and applications

If you’re creating an account for an application or website a basic requirement is usually your email address. It’s used to log in and receive notifications from the website or application you’re using.

Hide My Email works for this purpose too. Depending on the website you’re using, they might have an option to create an account using your Apple ID or create an account by simply using an email address. Hide My Email works with both options. You’ll sign up, the website will only see your “fake” email address and that’s what you’ll use to log in. iCloud will automatically save your password for the website if you choose so. Now you have an account but the website never gets your real email address, so if there’s a data leak all that leaks out is your temporary “fake” email that you can simply delete with one click from your iCloud settings.

Is hiding your email necessary?

This is a personal question and everyone will have a different answer. We’re used to giving our email addresses to everyone we deal with, but I believe as our lives become more digital, more of our personal information is linked to our accounts online and as data breaches become more and more common, these are the type of things that people should start considering. It’s been nice to see Apple give its users more and more tools recently to protect their privacy, and I’m confident that this is only the beginning. Give it ten or twenty years and we’ll be looking back at our reckless online behaviour shaking our heads how different things were back in the 2020’s.