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The bounce rate of what, exactly? Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design. Whenever I start

The bounce rate of what, exactly? Because the bounce rate of Hide My Email addresses being deliverable is going to rise over time, by design. Whenever I start getting spam at an address that's been leaked, I deactivate it. I've done the same with my oldest gmail account, but the work required there is notably higher.

MBCook 1mo ago
If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues. Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private one. So it’s not like they were “camouflaged.“ It’s a little odd they’re switching the subdomain though.
- Marsymars 1mo ago
  Right, but I'm asking "what bounce issues?" Like for my usage there are no bounce issues with the ~400 legitimate providers that I have Hide My Email addresses from. The only ones with bounce issues are the spammers who've acquired leaked addresses that I've deactivated.
  - saurik 1mo ago
    If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penalize senders the way, say, Google would if they see you sending a ton of email to their domains and they all bounce -- but people tend to use services to help send email and centrally pool their reputation (such as mailchimp) and so these services themselves then watch the bounce rate of their individual customers and either charge them more or ban their access due to the bounce rate increase.
    - xp84 1mo ago
      Is Apple really stupid enough that they BOUNCE emails after you deactivate, rather than just silent discard? What's the point of bouncing unwanted emails these days? It's not like these bounces go to humans who go "Oh, gee! This address must not work. Allow me to go and figure out how to contact him!" It's just a stream of full-on spam with completely fake return addresses, and crap from email campaign software.
      - Marsymars 1mo ago
        I mean my hope is to get the senders' IP/accounts/email reputation flagged for having additional bounces.
- jtbayly 1mo ago
  Hide My Email already uses plain old @iCloud.com as the domain. They are not changing the subdomain. There isn’t one. The announcement is they are leaving it as-is. The email addresses for sign-in with Apple do use the @private.iCloud.com subdomain, but again, that’s not a change.
- int_19h 1mo ago
  > If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. I couldn't. "Uses Apple products" is one of the more reliable signals of willingness and ability to spend money on stuff online.
- drdexebtjl 1mo ago
  Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. There’s no easy-to-check pattern. They’re not switching the subdomain. They’re keeping it the same. That’s the news. They’re switching the subdomain for the “Sign in with Apple” sign ups, which is not the same service.
  - fodkodrasz 1mo ago
    > Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. why would random selection from sets of predefined strings and joining them using a "." need any LLM involvement? Oh you need to check if it already taken... maybe for that? I'd use a database though... These days some people would even generate GUIDs with some language model, I guess...
    - drdexebtjl 1mo ago
      It’s probably not an LLM, nor a small transformer-based model, but it is a language model. Probably the kind that powered auto-correct before GPT. The generated words agree in grammatical gender and plural forms, so by definition it’s a language model.

MBCook 1mo ago

If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. Either just because they’re jerks or from bounce issues. Keeping it on a subdomain fixes that problem, to some degree. If the user is named ffjvhtu57325cjdjvg501a2@icloud.com no one is going to think that’s a real address. It’s very obviously a private one. So it’s not like they were “camouflaged.“ It’s a little odd they’re switching the subdomain though.

Marsymars 1mo ago
Right, but I'm asking "what bounce issues?" Like for my usage there are no bounce issues with the ~400 legitimate providers that I have Hide My Email addresses from. The only ones with bounce issues are the spammers who've acquired leaked addresses that I've deactivated.
- saurik 1mo ago
  If you merely deactivate your email address rather than closing your account or changing your notification settings or whatever, then the next time a legitimate service goes to send you a legitimate email that you asked for, it will bounce. In some sense this "shouldn't matter", as in a purely P2P system the only people who would notice are the sender and Apple -- and Apple knows what is going on, so should not penalize senders the way, say, Google would if they see you sending a ton of email to their domains and they all bounce -- but people tend to use services to help send email and centrally pool their reputation (such as mailchimp) and so these services themselves then watch the bounce rate of their individual customers and either charge them more or ban their access due to the bounce rate increase.
  - xp84 1mo ago
    Is Apple really stupid enough that they BOUNCE emails after you deactivate, rather than just silent discard? What's the point of bouncing unwanted emails these days? It's not like these bounces go to humans who go "Oh, gee! This address must not work. Allow me to go and figure out how to contact him!" It's just a stream of full-on spam with completely fake return addresses, and crap from email campaign software.
    - Marsymars 1mo ago
      I mean my hope is to get the senders' IP/accounts/email reputation flagged for having additional bounces.
jtbayly 1mo ago
Hide My Email already uses plain old @iCloud.com as the domain. They are not changing the subdomain. There isn’t one. The announcement is they are leaving it as-is. The email addresses for sign-in with Apple do use the @private.iCloud.com subdomain, but again, that’s not a change.
int_19h 1mo ago
> If they were moved to plain old icloud.com, I could absolutely see a bunch of companies starting to filter out all icloud.com email addresses to avoid private relay. I couldn't. "Uses Apple products" is one of the more reliable signals of willingness and ability to spend money on stuff online.
drdexebtjl 1mo ago
Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. There’s no easy-to-check pattern. They’re not switching the subdomain. They’re keeping it the same. That’s the news. They’re switching the subdomain for the “Sign in with Apple” sign ups, which is not the same service.
- fodkodrasz 1mo ago
  > Hide My Email addresses are not just a random string at icloud.com. They use plausibly-human names, probably generated by a language model. why would random selection from sets of predefined strings and joining them using a "." need any LLM involvement? Oh you need to check if it already taken... maybe for that? I'd use a database though... These days some people would even generate GUIDs with some language model, I guess...
  - drdexebtjl 1mo ago
    It’s probably not an LLM, nor a small transformer-based model, but it is a language model. Probably the kind that powered auto-correct before GPT. The generated words agree in grammatical gender and plural forms, so by definition it’s a language model.