The address dies. No more mail gets through.
iCloud+ subscribers can create unlimited burner email addresses that forward to their real inbox, protecting against spam and marketing databases. The feature integrates seamlessly with iOS 15 AutoFill, allowing automatic burner email generation during account signup without manual configuration.
- Hide My Email is built into any paid iCloud plan (iCloud+)
- Available on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15
- Burner addresses forward to your real inbox and can be deactivated instantly
- Feature integrates with AutoFill for automatic generation during signup
Apple's iCloud+ offers a built-in Hide My Email feature that generates disposable email addresses to protect users from spam and data harvesting when signing up for services.
Your email address is currency. Every time you hand it over to a website or service, you're trading a piece of your digital identity for access—and you rarely know where that address will end up. It might land in a marketing database. It might be sold. It will almost certainly generate spam. The solution most people don't know about is already sitting in their pocket.
If you subscribe to any paid iCloud plan—which Apple now calls iCloud+—you have access to a feature called Hide My Email. It's a built-in burner email generator that creates disposable addresses on demand, each one forwarding to your real inbox, each one killable in seconds. You don't need to sign up for a third-party service. You don't need to trust another company with your data. It's already there.
The feature works like this: when you need to sign up for something and you're not sure you want to hand over your actual email address, you generate a random one instead. Apple creates it for you. You use it to register. Any messages sent to that burner address arrive in your inbox as if they came to your real email. But the moment the service starts feeling sketchy, or the emails pile up, or you simply don't need it anymore, you deactivate it. The address dies. No more mail gets through. It's that simple.
Setting it up requires a few taps. On an iPhone or iPad running iOS 15 or later, you open Settings, tap your profile at the top, navigate to iCloud, and select Hide My Email. You'll choose which of your real email addresses should receive the forwarded messages—you can pick from any address you've already added to your account. Then you tap "Create New Address" and Apple generates a random one. If you don't like it, you can ask for another. You label it (something like "Netflix trial" or "sketchy retailer"), add a note if you want to remember why you created it, and you're done. Copy it to your clipboard and use it wherever you need.
The feature gets even more seamless during signup. When you're creating a new account in iOS 15, the AutoFill menu will offer Hide My Email as an option. Tap it, and Apple generates a burner address right there in the flow. You can regenerate it if the first one doesn't appeal to you, add a note about its purpose, and then tap "Use" to proceed with signup. No friction. No extra steps. It happens as naturally as filling in a password.
Managing these addresses is equally frictionless. You can change the forwarding destination or the label anytime. When you're finished with an address—whether that's after a week or a year—you open Hide My Email, select the address, and tap "Deactivate Email Address." Confirm the action and it's gone. No unsubscribe links to click. No waiting for removal. Just instant silence.
This matters because the alternative is either giving out your real email and accepting the consequences, or using a separate third-party burner service and trusting that company not to misuse your data. Hide My Email sidesteps both problems. It's a privacy tool built into the operating system by the company that already has access to your phone. For anyone paying for iCloud storage anyway, it's a feature that costs nothing extra and solves a real problem that most people face every time they encounter a signup form.
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why would someone need a burner email when they could just use a fake name and address?
Because the email is the thread that connects back to you. A fake name doesn't matter if the service can still track your behavior, sell your address to marketers, or use it to build a profile. The email is the actual vulnerability.
Doesn't Apple already have enough data about its users without also managing their burner emails?
That's fair to ask. But the difference is that Apple sees the burner addresses being created and deactivated—not the actual services you're signing up for. The forwarding happens on your device. Apple doesn't know if you used a burner for Netflix or a sketchy retailer.
What happens if you forget which burner address you used for which service?
That's why the label and note features exist. You can write "Netflix trial—expires Sept 2021" or "that sketchy retailer I'll never use again." It's a small friction point, but it's manageable.
Is there a limit to how many burner addresses you can create?
The source doesn't specify a hard limit, but it suggests you can create as many as you need. The real constraint is remembering what each one was for.
What if a service requires you to verify your email address by clicking a link?
The burner address still receives the verification email and forwards it to your real inbox. You click the link in the forwarded message and you're verified. It works transparently.
So this is really just for people who already pay for iCloud?
Yes. It's bundled into any paid iCloud plan. If you're already paying for cloud storage, you get this for free. If you're not, you'd need to subscribe to iCloud+ to access it.