Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me explain
why it may not be a good idea to use Hide My Email all the time.
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Now Hide My Email is a great feature of iCloud Plus. That's iCloud when you pay for something,
like a little bit of storage. Then you have all these extra features including Hide My
Email. If you turn that On it allows you to create these email addresses on the fly
when you signup for something online and then the email that you get sent from that site or
company goes to that special email address and is forwarded to you by Apple to your regular
email address. So the company or website doesn't have your actual email address.
The idea is that you could simply shutoff that special email address if you get spammed by
that company or it is obvious that that email address has been sold and you are getting a lot
of spam to it. It also is great because that site or company doesn't actually know who you
are. They can't take that email address and then cross reference it with other companies
and figure out your identity. So you're kind of signing up for something anonymously. Certainly
this is a great feature for signing up for things when you don't really trust
the site or company. If you need to signup for a website and they need an email address from you,
you could provide this Hide My Email address instead of your real one.
But, does that mean you should use it everywhere? Well, there's one case that
I'm seeing a lot of where you may not want to use it. If you go to MacMost.com you
don't need to signup for anything. There is no registration. All the stuff is there on
the site. But for my courses website and other things like Patreon you need to signup using
an email address because you need to have an account. There needs to be some sort of
User ID and your User ID is usually your email address because it is unique and owned by you.
Now let's say you go to my courses site here and you want to create a
new account. If you click here to enter your email address then you'll see Hide
My Email as one of the options. You may think this is a great option.
If you use it you'll generate this unique email address that you can certainly use as your ID
and email sent to it will get to you and the site has no idea who you are. So you can use Hide My
Email email address for signing up to any site, or social media sites, or shopping sites, for banking
sites, anything you want. You can use Hide My Email in place of you actual email address.
Here's the problem. That's now your ID for this site. So if at some point in the future
you forget your password or you loose it, it's somehow erased from the Password Manager and you
want to actually get the reminder or reset link for your password there's no way you're going
to know this is your ID for that site. Also, if you need to enter in your ID manually for
some reason you're going to have to type this whole thing in after you figure out what Hide
My Email address you used to signup for it. I've already had cases where somebody has
contacted me saying they can't remember how to log onto my courses website. Can I help?
I can't find their email address anywhere as a user. It turns out they used one of these Hide
My Email addresses and now it is impossible to connect them back to their real account.
So keep this in mind as you use Hide My Email to signup for sites and services. So if you're
just signing up for something one time just to get past a gate or just get a onetime message
or buy one product from a company or something like that then Hide My Email is pretty useful.
But if it is a site you plan on going back to again and this is now going to be your ID for
that site then it's a good idea to use your real email address. Remember that legitimate companies,
real companies with people and buildings and names and stock market tickers and all or that,
you can always Unsubscribe from any emails they send you. They have to abide by certain rules
and laws. For the most part they do. So don't worry too much about the spam aspect of it,
but do worry about loosing access to your account because you simply erased
this Hide My Email address or somehow you forgot which one you've used with that
site. I see this as becoming a bigger and bigger problem as more and more people use
Hide My Email and similar email alias services. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.