private relay
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”
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…