Apple has cancelled a planned change that would have moved iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses off icloud.com and onto a separate domain. In a developer news post dated 24 August 2026, the company said Hide My Email will stay on icloud.com after all — reversing a plan it published on 15 June. Sign in with Apple is still moving, but that part of the change was never the problem.
What Apple originally planned for Hide My Email
The June post laid out a consolidation. Apple said it would unify the email domains behind its two alias features under one shared domain, private.icloud.com. New Sign in with Apple addresses, until now issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, would move there. And new Hide My Email addresses, until now issued on icloud.com, would move there too. Existing addresses on the old domains would keep working and keep forwarding mail.
Tidy from Apple’s side. Bad for the people paying for it.
Why the domain mattered so much
Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature, meaning you pay for it. Its whole job is to give you a throwaway address that forwards to your real inbox, so a shopping site or a newsletter never learns your actual email. The feature only works if the site on the other end accepts the address.
And that is exactly what the domain controls. Today a Hide My Email alias sits on icloud.com — the same domain as every ordinary iCloud mailbox in the world. A site that wanted to refuse aliases at the domain level would have to block icloud.com outright, cutting off millions of legitimate customers in the process. Almost nobody is willing to do that. Move the aliases to a dedicated private.icloud.com, though, and blocking them becomes a one-line filter with no collateral damage. The privacy feature would still exist; it would simply stop working wherever a business decided it was inconvenient.
Apple has not said what the feedback it received actually argued — only that it reviewed it. But the blocking asymmetry above is the practical reason the domain matters, and Apple’s own June guidance shows the company was alive to domain-level filtering: it told email service providers to add private.icloud.com to any domain-based filtering, suppression lists or routing rules that enumerate relay domains. Whatever the reasoning, the outcome from the 24 August post is unambiguous:
After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.
Sign in with Apple is still changing
The other half of the June plan is going ahead. Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses will be issued on private.icloud.com instead of privaterelay.appleid.com. Apple says existing privaterelay.appleid.com addresses will keep working and keep forwarding mail. It has also slipped: the June post promised the move “later this summer”, while the August one now says later this year.
This one is cosmetic as far as blocking goes. privaterelay.appleid.com was already a dedicated relay domain that any site could recognise and filter on sight, so swapping it for another dedicated relay domain changes nothing about how identifiable those addresses are. The practical work falls on developers, who need their sign-up forms, email validation and allowlists to treat both domains as valid — otherwise users trying to sign in with a new-style address will simply be rejected.
What you need to do
Nothing. Aliases you have already created are unaffected either way, and Apple is not migrating anyone. If you use Hide My Email through Settings, Safari or Mail, the addresses you generate from here on will look exactly like the ones you have now.
Two things are worth saying plainly, though. It took public pushback to stop a change that would have quietly weakened a feature people are paying a subscription for — the June post presented it purely as a tidy-up, and its only mention of domain-level filtering was advice to mail providers on keeping the new domain deliverable. And the reversal was announced on Apple’s developer news page, not to the users whose privacy feature it is. If you rely on Hide My Email, you would have had no way of knowing any of this was in motion.
Apple’s broader position on iCloud privacy has been tested harder elsewhere this year — see our coverage of Apple’s fight against the UK’s iCloud backdoor demand.
Sources: Apple Developer News, 24 August 2026, Apple Developer News, 15 June 2026
