On Tuesday, Apple released the second beta of iOS 15.2 to developers and confirmed that the new update enabled child communication safety features in iMessage. But apart from this, the update has also added the “Hide My Email” option for iCloud+ subscribers directly in the Mail app. The option appears in the “From” field while composing an email in the Mail app.
To remind, Apple announced “Hide My Email” earlier this year as part of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey. The new privacy feature lets users generate random email addresses to log in to apps and websites. Notably, Hide My Email was already available on iOS and macOS, though partially, but has now been made available within Apple’s Mail app. Here’s how it works:
Hide My Email Feature is Now in Apple’s Mail App
In the latest iOS 15.2 developers beta 2, you can simply tap the “From” field to enable Hide My Email. Enabling this will let you send emails to other users/accounts without revealing your real email address. This way, you can prevent yourself from getting identified by masking your email address with some random email. Notably, you can still create random email addresses in the iCloud settings on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The change only expands Hide My Email to more places, as in the Mail app now.
According to Apple, the Hide My Email helps users to keep their personal email address private by creating a unique, random address that forwards to their personal inbox and can be deleted at any time. Note that Hide My Email is part of iCloud+, which means it is a paid subscription plan. So this feature is only available to iCloud+ subscribers. Apart from this, iCloud+ subscribers also get a feature to hide their IP address from the network. This way, they can avoid IP-based online tracking.
