aliases
Time to clarify a bit of confusion that I know people are having with Apple’s private/hiding methodology for email privacy: Private Relay versus Private Relay versus Hide my Email.Apple’s got a couple ways that they let an end subscriber hide their email address from an email sender, while still allowing communication to go through. Let’s review them.1. Apple Private Relay — let’s get this one out of the way first. Apple Private Relay can relate to both email sending and web browsing. On the web browsing side, Private Relay, a feature that comes with the paid iCloud+ service, “hides your IP address and browsing activity in Safari and protects your unencrypted internet traffic so that no one — including Apple — can see both who you are and what sites you’re visiting. Learn more about that here. TL;DR? This particular bit doesn’t have anything to do with email. 2. “Hide My Email”
It’s always good to take another look at email functionality through a security lens. Head on over to Krebs on Security to check out “The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases,” by the man himself, Brian Krebs. (And a side note to Brian: DALL-E can be great help and a bit of fun if you’re struggling to figure out what kind of graphic to include in a new blog post!)
Here’s what is sure to be your favorite fun factoid forever from today: At Gmail — for the domains gmail.com and googlemail.com — whether or not the username portion has dots in it is irrelevant. If you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@gmail.com and aliversonmailbox@gmail.com, you’re sending mail to the same person, the same account, twice. Don’t take my word for it — here’s the Google help page with details.As Google indicates, this does not apply to Google for Business, aka G-Suite addresses. So if you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@wombatmail.com and aliversonmailbox@wombatmail.com, those are indeed two separate addresses.The Gmail “dot thing” is sometimes a huge pain in the rear for senders. If you can work it into your registration forms, you could try normalizing Gmail addresses by removing the dots, to prevent duplicate submissions. Or disallowing dots in the username, if the domain is gmail.com or googlemail.com. However, even this is a bit…