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Hide My Email - Too much friction? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Request for advice at the end of this!

I want to use a throwaway email, using iCloud's Hide My Email, in a web form.

How it is (I think):

Open System Settings (which always seems to default to Appearance, for some reason)
Click on Name/Apple ID
Click on iCloud
Click on Hide My Email
Click "+"
Fill in a label (I usually just put the URL)
Click Continue
Click Copy address
Go back to web form and paste.

9 steps! Or 10, depending on how you're counting.

How it should be:

I click or right-click on the email field in the web form
My Mac asks me if I want to create a new email, I click yes (A new email is created, filled in, and registered in my list of email aliases, with no further input from me)

2 steps.

Apple really likes to suggest that things "just work" so they hide things. I think they've lost their way with respect to usability. Sorry, ranting.

Request(s) for advice

Is the quick method already possible somewhere in the UI, and I'm just missing it? If it isn't already there, does anyone have a solution, say a script for a service, that would accomplish this?

I would appreciate any advice, instructions, or even just commiseration on hidden UIs. Thanks 😊

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm the CTO of a tech platform that has a consumer component of it, and the real issue is that normal people just have zero idea of how it works and generally expect it to work differently.

The main source of confusion is that if a service uses your email address to identify a user, and that user gives up a completely random email address, they now have no way of identifying themselves unless they remember they used hide my email.

They assume two things: 1) that they will still be identifiable by their "real" email address some how, and 2) if they do use their real email address later, it will somehow map back to the previous hidden email.

Also if they use Apple Mail, most of them are not aware of how to figure out what email address an email was sent to, so they can't identify if they hid their email address, or not, even when we're sending them emails.

My evidence for this is thousands and thousands of customer support cases. Our CS folks HATE this feature.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Okay, I feel your pain 😊 I'm not one of those users, I think. If you're on Apple Mail, they make it pretty easy to figure out which email was used to send to (see pic).

But without a message in the inbox, you'd have to know to check the list of hidden emails in System Settings. Having done a lot of family tech support myself, I can see a problem there.

The only upside is that technically uninclined folks would probably not know how to set up the email in the first place 🤷🏻‍♂️