Are you tired of offering your primary email ID to random websites and apps on the phone? With the current practice, you are looking at your mailbox filling up with irrelevant marketing emails and other spam. Apple’s Hide My Email wants to ease the whole sign up experience without affecting your privacy and email inbox. 

What Is Hide My Email on iPhone

As the name suggests, the main function of Hide My Email is to keep your primary email address away from random apps and websites on the iPhone. So instead of yourname@icloud.com, Apple will generate and use random@icloud.com and redirect all emails to the original email ID. Hide My Email is built upon Sign in with Apple function that debuted with iOS 13. Sign in with Apple gives you an option to create a virtual email address to share with app developers and other online services and apps. With Hide My Email, Apple is further extending the functionality with a friendlier ending @icloud.com domain than a random and awkward @privateicloud.appleid.com domain.

How to Use Hide My Email on iPhone

As we mentioned above, the function is built into the Safari browser, Mail, and apps supporting Sign in with Apple function. Let’s take an app as an example here. 

  1. Open a newly downloaded app on the iPhone. 
  2. From the signup page, select the Sign in with Apple button. 
  3. Select Hide my email at the bottom and tap on Continue.  The developer will receive a random email address instead of your original email address.  But then again, what about promotional emails from the same developer? How can they reach you as they don’t have your original email ID? Don’t worry. Apple will forward all the emails from the sent random address to your original Apple ID in the Mail app. So you will continue to receive emails even though the developer doesn’t have your original email address. Win-win for both parties.  You can use the same Hide my email feature on Safari browser as well. As soon as you try to sign up for any service from the Safari browser, you will notice the Hide my email option pop up over the keyboard.  Tap on Hide my email and it will suggest a random email ID to use with the service. Tap on Continue and you can add a note related to the email ID and take a peek at the label. Tap on Use and the email ID is ready to use.  We tried loading the same website on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome on the iPhone. The OS didn’t show any Hide my email option. 

How to Customize Hide my email

This is yet another new addition to iOS 15. Unlike the previous version, users can actually see all those created virtual email IDs from the Settings menu.  You can further customize some options as well. 

  1. Open the Settings app on iPhone. 
  2. Tap on Apple ID at the top. 
  3. Open iCloud and select Hide my email from the following menu.  Here, you can see all the random email addresses that you created using Sign in with Apple option over the last two years.  From the same menu, you can create a new address and give it a relevant label or add a note. You can also go to any service and disable Forward to toggle so that you won’t receive any new email from the app or service in your primary email inbox. 

How to Disable Hide my email on iPhone

At any point, you can stop using Hide my email on iPhone and sign up again for a service using your main email ID. Here’s how.  Open the Settings app on the iPhone and go to Profile > iCloud > Hide my email menu. Open a service for which you want to sign up again.  Tap on Manage Sign in with Apple Settings and select Edit from the following menu. Tap on Delete and select Stop using. The next time when you try to access the app or website, it will ask you to sign up again as you have removed your account credentials from the Hide my email menu.  How do I check created email addresses on iPhone? You can go to Settings > Profile > iCloud > Hide my email menu and check all the created email addresses using Hide my email on the iPhone or Mac.  How do I disable email forwards in my primary email account? Navigate to Settings > Profile > iCloud > Hide my email and select a service from which you want to stop getting emails. Disable Forward to toggle and you are good to go.  Is Hide my email free? Yes, Hide my email is absolutely free to use. However, you can unlock more goodies such as the ability to create a random email address or the ability to hide your email address while sending emails via an iCloud subscription. iCloud paid plans start at $0.99 per month.

Wrapping Up: Use Hide my email on iPhone

Hide my email is an excellent add-on for iPhone users. You can keep signing up for new services without worrying about email spam on your iPhone. In true Apple fashion, the Hide my email is also available on the latest macOS and iPadOS. iCloud+ subscribers get even more functions with an option to create unlimited email addresses and using Hide my email in the default Email app on the iPhone.