Four prevalent themes in the discussion
1. Privacy‑concern: the change makes Hide My Email (and Sign in with Apple) easy to block, threatening user privacy
- “If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.” – giancarlostoro
- “Now Hide My Email allowed you to create an account with an email that wasn’t tied to your identity… By separating the domains, sites can simply add private.icloud.com to their trash‑mail blocklist, preventing the use of Hide My Email, while regular @iCloud.com addresses will continue to work. It makes the entire service useless at once.” – 9dev
- “It’s a win for privacy‑intruders, not users.” – Razengan
2. Easier blocking for services / anti‑fraud motivation
- “Now, they will be blah@private.icloud.com, so it will be easy to ban the generated/private email that reduces the ability to associate logins across services.” – w10‑1
- “The point of the article is previously banning Apple's temp domain would create many false positives (all the normal Apple registered emails that chose @icloud.com during setup).” – BoorishBears
- “Many sites check the domain part of your email address against a blocklist, which contains entries like trashmail.com to prevent users from signing up with ad‑hoc throwaway accounts.” – 9dev
3. Alternatives and work‑arounds (custom domains, Fastmail, SimpleLogin, etc.)
- “If you don’t mind trusting another company with forwarding your emails, it’s definitely less hassle to set up an equivalent service for yourself.” – c7b
- “I have run this for years with very little problems… I have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain.” – jonotime (on using a personal domain)
- “Fastmail also has wonderful random email functionality you can link up to your Bitwarden client…” – righthand
- “I use Proton aliases everywhere…” – teekert
4. Debate over whether blocking privacy‑focused emails is justified (fraud prevention vs. anti‑user stance)
- “If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway.” – hamdingers
- “If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud.” – hamdingers
- “I’m not so rude as to call you 'laughably naive' but I am speaking from experience and you appear to be considering a hypothetical.” – hamdingers
- “If your website needs an email address at all.. otherwise just use null@null.null, if it accepts and doesn’t require a authentication code.” – HelloUsername (illustrating the extreme view that email shouldn’t be required at all)