How To Use Hide My Email On Mac and iOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at Hide My Email.

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So Hide My Email is a privacy feature that was introduced in macOS Monterey. It allows you to send out an email and the receiver won't see your real email address. They'll see a different one but if they use that email address to send something back to you, you'll receive it. So you can send somebody a message without revealing your real email address. This is basically how it works. Say using your real email address account you're going to send an email to somebody else. Normally you would send it and your real email address would be in the From part of the message. When they would get it in their account they would see your real email address right there. 

Now with Hide My Email it's a little different. The From email address is changed. The email is still coming from your account but this new email address is there in the From line. So when the other person gets it they'll receive it and they will see it as coming from that email address, not your real one. However, when they go to reply to you they would send that reply back to that different email address and it would still come to you in your account. You would still get it. But the To email address would be that special email, not your actual one. So you can correspond with the person back and forth using this special email address and the whole time they never see your real one. 

So the idea here is that you can keep your real email address private. This could be really useful when you're contacting a person, a site, or a service that maybe you don't trust completely. You don't want them to get your real email address because they may sell it to marketers or use it in some other way. By giving them this different email address they'll only have that. That's the only way they'll know you. So if they decide to do something else with that email address, like sending you a bunch of spam or selling it to marketers, then you can block all of the email coming to that address later on. Plus, since they don't have your real email address they know less about you. You're probably using your real email address to log onto different websites, like banks, social media networks, and shopping sites. If they have your real email address they have that part of your identification for those sites. But if they have this Hide My Email email address then they don't even know that about you. So let's look at how to use this.

You can see Hide My Email in several places. One of those is System Preferences. So go into System Preferences and then to your Apple ID. Then you'll see Hide My Email. Now it's important to know here Hide My Email is a feature only for people who have iCloud Plus. iCloud Plus is Apple's name for any paid iCloud Account. So if you're paying just a little bit for storage then you have iCloud Plus. If you aren't paying for any iCloud services at all, you just have iCloud's free storage amount with free services, that's not going to include Hide My Email. You click on Options here you'll see Hide My Email and it will give you a list of all of the email addresses that you've created here on the left. Then you can select one and see information on the right. So here's this particular email address. You can use this to fill out a form online and when somebody tries to send you an email using this address it will come to you. You can see where it comes to you right here. You could also set a label for this and you could edit the label so you could add a label that makes sense to describe what you used this for. At the bottom here you can see the default Forward To address. So set that up for your main email address. You can change it by using this Options button right here. 

Now you're also going to see in this list anytime that you have used Sign-In with Apple ID. That's a service where you can go to a site and choose to sign-in using your Apple ID instead of your email address. In this case Apple creates one of these Hide My Email email addresses and that's what it gives to the site or service instead of your real email address. So those are included in here as well. Those actually aren't part of iCloud Plus. They are just part of regular iCloud.

Now if you want to manually create a Hide My Email email address you could do so by clicking the Plus button here. Then you can create a label so you can call it whatever you want. Maybe name it something so you know where it was that you used it. Like the name of the site or service you're going to use this email address for. You could see right here it creates the email address. Now you can't create your own. Apple's going to use some random words, letters, and other symbols to create these. If you really don't like what's there you can click this button and it will create a different one. Also notice this is a scrolling area here. You can scroll down and you could see here's where you can change the note and you could also Deactivate this. So say if you've used it once for something and you never want to use it again, you don't want anybody to be able to contact you using this special email address. Maybe you're getting spam with it right now. You can deactivate it right here. Also note that under the Forward To options you can see whatever email address you're using as your Apple ID. If that's the same as your iCloud email address there will just be one here. But if you're using any aliases in iCloud you'll see those listed here as well. You can have up to three aliases with your iCloud Account. That's been around forever. So you do have the option of choosing which one of those aliases to use or your actual iCloud email address. For the most part you're just going to set this to your main email address here because the whole idea is that the other person can't see this anyway. It's just for you. It's for the email to come into your main email address. 

Now you can also access this on the web. You can go to iCloud.com right here. Go to Account Settings and then one of the options here is Hide My Email. You can manage it right here on a webpage. You have all the same options here. You can click on one of these. You can see all the details. Change the label. Change the note. Deactivate. Of course you can do this in iOS, on your iPhone or iPad. You would go into Settings and then into your Apple ID and then iCloud and then one of the options here is Hide My Email. It's the same basic options here. 

Now in macOS Monterey 12.1 you have the ability to create a new Hide My Email email address right in the Mail app. So all you need to do here is compose a new message. You want to make sure you create the To field first. Now in From, usually you can click here to choose from your different accounts. Or maybe you didn't even see From before because you only had one email account. But now if you select here, in addition to all of your accounts maybe some aliases as well, you're going to see Hide My Email at the bottom. Select that and it's going to generate a new Hide My Email email address right there on the spot. Now you can fill out the body of the message. Send this along and they're only going to see this email address. Now when you go back into System Preferences and look at Hide My Email you'll see this one right here. Notice that by default it gives it the name of the email address you sent To. So it's an easy way to identify when you used this. You used this when you sent to this email address. You can go in here and change the label if you want. 

Now here's something really cool. If you go and compose a new message and you send it to the same person and you choose Hide My Email, instead of creating a new one it's going to recognize that you're sending to a person that you already used a special email address for and it's going to reuse that same one. So that person will see that same special email address for you. It's not going to create a new one each and every time. This allows you to correspond back and forth with the same person and always use that special email address.

Now when you send something using Hide My Email and you receive an email back this is what it looks like. You get something here at the top that says, this message was forwarded to you by Hide My Email. It's a reminder that they don't know your real email address. Notice under To here it actually shows that email address. So the email remains intact. It doesn't change this to be your real email address. Now when you respond to them it's automatically going to use that special email address here. This means you can also use special rules to filter these messages. The best place to do that, of course, is in iCloud.com. not in the Mail App. Doing it in iCloud.com means it will work for all of your devices. So you can go into Mail here and then you can go to Preferences and then if you go to Rules you can add a new rule and say, the message is addressed to, and then use that Hide My Email email address here and then have it do something automatic so that every email sent to that special email address can then be filtered in some way. 

Of course, another way to use this is when signing up for a website if you want to use a different email address than your real one you can go to Create an Account like right here. Instead of using your real email address you have the ability to use Hide My Email here as well. You could just Copy and Paste from System Preferences but this allows you to create a new one right here on the fly. So you can see it creates this special one right here. You can do Continue here and it will create this Hide My Email email address with the label for the website that you're on. So it's handy for hiding your real email address from a website that you sign up for. Also handy if you want to sign up for a separate account at the same site and the email address is used as your ID. You can't use your email address for a second account but you can use a Hide My Email email address to set up a second account.

I do want to give some advice about using this sparingly. If you're signing up for a website that you trust, that's important to you, either a bank, a service you plan to use a lot. Maybe a shopping site you plan on returning to time and time again, then you probably want to use your real email address. I mean a shopping site is probably going to need your credit card information. It's going to have your address for shipping and all of that. Just hiding your email address for a site you trust doesn't make much sense. However, if you're signing up for a service and you're not sure if you trust the site, maybe you might only use this once, maybe it's a shopping site where you're just going to order one item and you can't see yourself returning to later, then it could be handy to create one of these. But if you use it too often the list could become huge and a little difficult to manage. You may find yourself, later on, trying to sign into a website or something and using your regular email address without realizing that you used one of these special email addresses for it instead. So probably the right answer is to use it sometimes when you feel you really need an extra layer of privacy and other times use your regular email address. It's a judgement call but it's important to think about each and every time so that you're not simply creating a different email address for every single thing that you sign up for, every person that you email, every service that you add. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.