As documented in Apple’s support page on Hide My Email, we should be able to reply from these random addresses.
You can read and respond directly to emails sent to these addresses and your personal email address is kept private.
But I’m struggling to find how. I have them redirect to my personal email address not in iCloud. But even in Mail.app, I can’t seem to reply with these random addresses.
Just reply. That’s it!
Basically when you receive an email from any sender. The sender email also gets replaced by an iCloud email. So you reply to that address and iCloud magically will forward this email using your Hide My Email.
Hm, that’s interesting:
Please note that if you reply to an email forwarded from “Hide My Email,” the recipient will see your regular email address, not the random one, so you can’t use it to hide your identity in a two-way conversation. Apple designed Hide My Email as a one-way system, mostly for protection from commercial spam.
From:
https://www.howtogeek.com/756255/how-to-use-icloud-hide-my-email-on-iphone-and-ipad/
And I get that. It could be quite creepy to be able to send mail anonymously.
It might be worth giving it a try to check if Apple really is anonymizing outgoing mail.
Yep, not true from my experience, the sender email gets anonymized for that.
So I recommend trying the experience end to end.
Just tested with my own email, everything gets randomized. Just reply just works. The only caveat, that when you reply you will send a copy to your own Hide My Email, so you might want to remove that address from the TO: bar, so you do not get additional copy of the sent email.
In my experience this hasn’t been the case. I use gmail in Mail.app. When I replied one email sent to my random address, the sender is shown as my real address. I just double checked this is true by sending to and responding from a random address.
What is your email setup for this to work properly?
I am using Hey.com and Spark. And they are working as I mentioned. I would like to discuss it further; I tried it before my previous reply and worked as I mentioned.