How to leave mailing list when I've used Hide my Email

[svenmany]

I'm subscribed to a mailing list. I did that by sending an email to join-<list>@server. I used Hide My Email for my subscription. Now I need to send an email to leave-<list>@server from the same Hide My Email address. Is there any way to do this?

I believe the answer is no and my only solution is to disable that address. But, this seems pretty rude to the list owner.

 

[belvdr]

How did you send the first email with your hidden address?

 

[svenmany]

How did you send the first email with your hidden address?

Thanks for the response!

I used the MacOS Apple Mail app. I filled in the "join" address in the "to" field. Then, I used the dropdown to select the "from" and chose "Hide My Email". That generated a new random address for the "from" field of the actual email.

So, now I'm writing an email to the "leave" address. I see no way to reuse that generated address in this new email.

So far I've only looked for solutions using the Apple Mail app, but I'm open to any suggestions.

 

[belvdr]

I found this. Does it help?

https://www.reddit.com/r/iCloud/comments/prrm3c

 

[svenmany]

I found this. Does it help?

https://www.reddit.com/r/iCloud/comments/prrm3c

Thanks so much for finding that. The poster seems pretty knowledgable, so I'm trusting their evaluation of the situation.

Basically they say that a unique "to" address is associated with the Hide My Email address. I can't use a different "to" address for the same Hide My Email address. Even though my two "to" address are almost identical (once starts with "join" and one starts with "leave"), they aren't the same address and can't share the same Hide My Email address.

So, I'm out of luck. Well, the list manager is out of luck since I can't let them know to stop mailing me. Maybe bounced emails will trigger something on their end eventually.

Thanks again, your help is much appreciated.

 

[iStorm]

Thanks so much for finding that. The poster seems pretty knowledgable, so I'm trusting their evaluation of the situation.

Basically they say that a unique "to" address is associated with the Hide My Email address. I can't use a different "to" address for the same Hide My Email address. Even though my two "to" address are almost identical (once starts with "join" and one starts with "leave"), they aren't the same address and can't share the same Hide My Email address.

So, I'm out of luck. Well, the list manager is out of luck since I can't let them know to stop mailing me. Maybe bounced emails will trigger something on their end eventually.

Thanks again, your help is much appreciated.

This isn't entirely correct. It isn't a one-to-one mapping. You can give the same hidden email to multiple people/sites...and if they email you, you can reply to them using the same hidden email address.

I actually did this several months ago when I was looking for something that was out of stock on multiple sites. I went into Hide My Email settings, created one hidden email, and used that to sign up for in-stock alerts on those sites. I got emails/newsletters from all these sites, but once it was in stock somewhere, I just deactivated that email address...and boom, no more emails from any of those sites anymore. Anyway, that is a bit off topic and doesn't exactly help with your dilemma.

---

I did tinker with this and found a way to get it to do what you want. It's a bit confusing and YMMV.

Sent the following email:
To: My Hidden Email
From: My outlook.com address
Body: leave@company.com​

After I received the email to my hidden address (which is set to forward to my outlook.com address), I tapped the leave@company link and it retained the Hidden Email as the from address. I sent the email, and it behaved as expected. It sent to that new address using my existing hidden one.

Now when I tried this using my iCloud address (and changed my forwarding to there), it didn't work...

To: My Hidden Email
From: My iCloud.com address
Body: leave@company.com​

Tapping the email link put my iCloud email as the from address. I'm not sure why using my Outlook address worked, but my iCloud one didn't. I should also note that I did this from my phone (iOS 16).

---

Otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much about disabling the address (which I don't consider to be rude). It's pretty much one of the purposes of this feature...so you can end communication on your terms in case the other party doesn't comply with your requests to opt out. The email will bounce back to them and they'll see it couldn't be delivered. It could even be all automated on their end to handle bounce backs and remove it from the list.

 

[svenmany]

This isn't entirely correct. It isn't a one-to-one mapping. You can give the same hidden email to multiple people/sites...and if they email you, you can reply to them using the same hidden email address.

I actually did this several months ago when I was looking for something that was out of stock on multiple sites. I went into Hide My Email settings, created one hidden email, and used that to sign up for in-stock alerts on those sites. I got emails/newsletters from all these sites, but once it was in stock somewhere, I just deactivated that email address...and boom, no more emails from any of those sites anymore. Anyway, that is a bit off topic and doesn't exactly help with your dilemma.

---

I did tinker with this and found a way to get it to do what you want. It's a bit confusing and YMMV.

Sent the following email:​

To: My Hidden Email​

From: My outlook.com address​

Body: leave@company.com​

After I received the email to my hidden address (which is set to forward to my outlook.com address), I tapped the leave@company link and it retained the Hidden Email as the from address. I sent the email, and it behaved as expected. It sent to that new address using my existing hidden one.

Now when I tried this using my iCloud address (and changed my forwarding to there), it didn't work...

To: My Hidden Email​

From: My iCloud.com address​

Body: leave@company.com​

Tapping the email link put my iCloud email as the from address. I'm not sure why using my Outlook address worked, but my iCloud one didn't. I should also note that I did this from my phone (iOS 16).

---

Otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much about disabling the address (which I don't consider to be rude). It's pretty much one of the purposes of this feature...so you can end communication on your terms in case the other party doesn't comply with your requests to opt out. The email will bounce back to them and they'll see it couldn't be delivered. It could even be all automated on their end to handle bounce backs and remove it from the list.

Thanks for that. It's a very clever trick. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me on my Mac. I sent from Fastmail, through iCloud, and on to gmail. I opened the gmail email in Apple mail and clicked on the email link in the body. Apple mail always put a normal email address or a new HME address when sending.

I suspect the one-to-one mapping is correct. However, the question is which software respects it and limits things accordingly. Apple Mail on the Mac tries to do that for outgoing mail.

I decided to try something else that worked for me. I just didn't use Apple Mail. I registered my HME address with Fastmail as an identity. I just had to verify that I could receive email at that address. After that, I was able to use Fastmail's web interface to send the email from that HME address.

Thanks again.

 

[Ruggy]

If your hide my email address doesn't contain any special characters (unlikely in my experience) then you can add it as an alias to your icloud address and then you can send from it. I think there are a couple of conditions for icloud addresses like not beginning with a number so I realise it isn't very likely to be useful here.
Otherwise, rather than using a different mail client you can get rid of the messages using 'rules'.
If you go into 'preferences' on mail you'll see the rules tab and there you can add a rule so that emails from that sender are automatically deleted. You won't see them again.
Or, if you want to receive some of them it should be possible to delete just some of them by filtering a word so for example if it says 'newsletter' you can create a rule which will delete from that sender but only the newsletters. Or it maybe an email from someone and the newsletter comes from an address with 'no-reply' in it so you can delete just those. You can also pick out part of the email address if that's useful too
Rules are very powerful and useful.

 

[Fishrrman]

If you can't get yourself off of the list, just set up an email rule that automatically deletes anything coming from that email server.

Then they can happily send forever to your phony email address, and you won't have to worry about seeing them.

 

[svenmany]

If you can't get yourself off of the list, just set up an email rule that automatically deletes anything coming from that email server.

Then they can happily send forever to your phony email address, and you won't have to worry about seeing them.

Good tip on using rules.

I did manage to get off the list by using the Fastmail web client. Using that I was able to send from the HME address to the unsubscribe address of the list. It's only the Apple Mail client that resists the use of the HME address when sending to a different address. I also deleted the HME address altogether. So, I've satisfied my ethical obligation to the mailing list owners and guaranteed that I won't receive emails from them.

If your hide my email address doesn't contain any special characters (unlikely in my experience) then you can add it as an alias to your icloud address and then you can send from it. I think there are a couple of conditions for icloud addresses like not beginning with a number so I realise it isn't very likely to be useful here.

Wow, thanks. I'm going to play with that. I had no idea that was possible. This could actually make these addresses far more useful to me.

 

[svenmany]

If your hide my email address doesn't contain any special characters (unlikely in my experience) then you can add it as an alias to your icloud address and then you can send from it.

Struggling with the alias thing. I've tried now and again for the last couple of hours and get.

I assume that's the kind of alias you were suggesting?