Apple has reversed a planned change to its Hide My Email feature, confirming that the iCloud+ privacy tool will continue to use the icloud.com domain rather than being moved to a separate private.icloud.com address.
The company announced the decision after receiving pushback from users who argued the proposed domain change would have made it far easier for websites and apps to block Hide My Email addresses outright.
Because Hide My Email aliases currently share the same icloud.com domain as standard iCloud email accounts, services that block disposable addresses risk also blocking legitimate iCloud users.
Moving aliases to private.icloud.com would have removed that friction, giving platforms a clean way to filter out all Hide My Email addresses without affecting anyone else.
Apple originally announced the domain consolidation in June, framing it as a way to unify the addresses generated by both Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple under a single private.icloud.com domain.
Users quickly spotted the problem: the change would have undercut the core utility of Hide My Email, which depends on aliases blending in with real iCloud addresses to remain usable across services.
What actually changes
Apple’s reversal applies only to Hide My Email. Sign in with Apple addresses will still move to private.icloud.com later this year, transitioning away from the current privaterelay.appleid.com domain.
Addresses created before that change will continue to forward without interruption, but Apple advises developers to update their systems to accept the new domain alongside the existing one.
Hide My Email is included with paid iCloud+ subscriptions. It generates a unique alias for each site or service a user signs up with, forwarding incoming messages to the user’s real address while keeping that address hidden.
Users can disable or delete individual aliases at any time, which makes the feature useful for managing unwanted email or limiting exposure to data breaches.
Broader iCloud context
The change follows a rough month for Apple’s iCloud privacy features. Security researchers discovered that iCloud Private Relay can leak users’ real IP addresses on sites using passkeys, leading to a fraud and false advertising lawsuit over Apple’s privacy claims.
Apple has not commented publicly on the Private Relay litigation. The Hide My Email domain decision, by contrast, moves in users’ favor, preserving the practical protection the feature was built around.
