Tell HN: Stop using Apple's Hide My Email, its a one-way street

I came across this post while searching for something else.

This behavior is to mitigate the risk of abuse, plain and simple. Apple does not want ephemeral iCloud addresses sending out malicious content.

Yes, you can still theoretically do this with a regular iCloud email. However, it is rate-limited by the sign up process, which requires the threat actor to burn another email address or phone number (and a device ID, probably).

Use something like SimpleLogin instead. Even still, I find Hide My Email useful for Apple Pay, where I only receive transactional emails anyway.

You post this like there's no use case for an address that just forwards to an address or reply to emails sent to you. Apple is in fact clear that is what it does in the description. https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

> Hide My Email generates unique, random email addresses that automatically forward to your personal inbox. Each address is unique to you. You can read and respond directly to emails sent to these addresses and your personal email address is kept private.

Nothing there suggests you can generate new email threads from an address, just "respond directly". While that may not meet your needs, it does meet the needs of other use cases for which it was designed (e.g. signing up for a service you don't want to provide your true email address for). That's absolutely no reason to call for a blanket "stop using it".

Apple are pretty clear this is for one way communication. It’s not an email replacement, it’s a privacy tool. There is always a trade off when it comes to privacy, and in this case it is that you can’t send email.

There are plenty of great tools out there which allow you to create multiple addresses with the ability to send. Maybe you should consider the trade offs that are acceptable to your specific use case and invest/use/setup/buy into them? You could buy a random domain and set up a catch all address if you want to keep it simple.

Before Relay was a thing I wanted to learn about SMTP and make a service which could do something very similar to what Relay ended up being but for mobile. I’m still running it ~4 years later (https://inboxesapp.com) and it’s a great learning experience. If you don’t have what you want - build it!

i will give my 2 cents.

i use mailinabox and it works good enough for me. I can generate aliases at any limit and without any burden. Now, what you are describing is the same in mailinabox. the alias is merely a "receiving" alias. you cannot send from that.

what i found out was, how i can bypass this is by deleting the alias, then creating a new user with that email. a new email inbox is created. then you send that email whatever you want to send.

then you can delete the user and create alias once again and you are back to square one.

i know, its tedious process but it works for me. since apple probably wont let you create accounts with those disposable emails, then they should allow sending from aliases.