iCloud Problem: iCloud Custom Domain combined with Hide My Email

[dr.wong]

Hi All,

I've just started using the two big new iCloud+ features, "Custom Domain" and "Hide My Email". I'm particularly fond of the "Hide My Email" feature and I've started using it with practically every website and online store that I sign up for.

I've now also started using the Custom Domain feature, which appears to work flawlessly. Until today that is.

I bought something online from a store that I'm not familiar with, and so I decided to use the "Hide My Email" feature. The transaction required me to place an order, fill in my details etc and then they would manually send me an invoice via email once the order had been confirmed.

I duly received the manual invoice to my "Hide My Email" address, to which I had to respond with proof of payment etc. It seems that Apple replaces the sender's email address with a proxy address when you're making use of the "Hide My Email" feature, presumably to allow you to respond using your "fake" email address.

However, as I was responding using my Custom Domain address, Mail was unable to connect to the SMTP server at all. I had to manually figure out the actual email address that I was sending to in order for the message to go through.

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this or has any tips on how to avoid future admin/issues.

 

[waymarker]

Not sure if you figured this out but I just tested something similar.

- I sent and email from another service to one of my icloud hide my email addresses.
- Received it in the Mail app and replied using my custom domain (my default sending address in Mail).
- Got the same issue you had, but figured out it was because hide my email was configured to forward all messages to my primary icloud address rather than my custom domain one.

Have you checked what you have configured under ”forward to” at the bottom of your hide my email list in settings? Make sure it is your custom domain email. Once I changed this on my side, I was able to reply using my custom domain address to the proxy address that the message appeared to come from. This was then correctly delivered to the external mailbox.

However, bit of an issue that the reply received in that external mailbox showed my real custom domain email address and not the hide my alias. I would have thought it would make more sense for the latter to be used in this scenario.

EDIT:

Ah. Just changed “forward to” back to my primary icloud and re did the test, this time replying from that same primary icloud address, and it showed up in the external mailbox as coming from the hide my address. So it seems that it works fine with icloud addresses, but not custom domain addresses. Hopefully this functionality will come soon.

 

[dr.wong]

Thanks for checking it out!