At the WWDC 2021 event, among a plethora of things, Apple announced iCloud+ as a part of iOS 15/ iPadOS 15, which brings more security and privacy-protecting features. One of them is Hide My Email, and it lets you share a unique, random email address while signing up on a website or app to protect your personal identity. That said, the feature is available to paid users and only works when you choose the “Sign in with Apple” option. So if you are looking to get iCloud‘s Hide My Email feature on Windows and Android for free, this guide will help you out. In fact, Apple users who don’t want to subscribe to the paid iCloud+ service can also take advantage of the services I have mentioned below. So without any delay, let’s jump in.
I have included two services that let you hide your email ID, just like the new iCloud+ feature. Both of the services are not limiting, and you can use the random addresses anywhere, be it a webpage or an app.
- How to Get Hide My Email Feature on Windows
- How to Get Hide My Email Feature on Android
How to Get Hide My Email Feature on Windows
- Firefox Relay
Firefox offers a great service called Relay that does exactly what Apple’s Hide My Email promises to do. It’s a free and simple service that lets you create new aliases, aka random IDs (up to 5), for your personal email address. And then, it forwards emails sent to your aias to your personal ID without exposing your original email address. It now even supports attachment forwarding, but the file size is capped at 150KB. It’s a perfect Hide My Email replacement on Windows and Android.
Firefox Relay
- Now, you will log in to the Firefox Relay dashboard. To create a random address, click on “Generate New Alias” and that’s it. Copy the random email address, and you can use the same on any sign-up form. You can create a total of 5 aliases.
SimpleLogin
SimpleLogin is another service like iCloud’s Hide My Email that allows you to host 15 aliases. It’s an open-source online service and supports anonymous replies as well, which is awesome. The service offers both free and paid plans, but the free tier should suffice the need for most users. Under the free version, you have no limitation on bandwidth and have access to extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, support for custom domain names, and more.
- If you want to create a custom alias, click on the “New Custom Alias” option. Here, you can select a domain of your choice and an alias prefix.
Note that Firefox Relay does not have an Android app, so you will have to use a workaround. First, generate the aliases in a web browser on either your smartphone or computer. After that, add the aliases to your smartphone’s clipboard. Here is how you can do it.
- Copy the alias first and open the keyboard on your Android phone. In my case, I’m using Gboard, but clipboard support is present on other keyboard apps, including SwiftKey, as well. Tap on the 3-dot menu and choose “Clipboard”.
If you are using SimpleLogin, you don’t have to depend on any workarounds. The company offers both Android and iOS apps, so you can easily hide your email by using the generated addresses. Just follow the steps below:
- Now, just copy the random email address and paste it on any registration page. You can create up to 15 aliases for free with SimpleLogin.
AddyManager (Unofficial Client of AnonAddy)
Like SimpleLogin, AnonAddy is an open-source, freemium email forwarding service that works on both PCs and Android devices. However, the limiting part about the free version of AnonAddy is that it has a monthly bandwidth of just 10MB, which gets exhausted quickly if too many heavy emails are forwarded to your personal email address.
After that, it will give you a long string of characters. Copy it and do not share it with anyone.
Well, you will successfully log in to AddyManager. From here, You can create random email addresses (up to 20) by tapping on the “+” button at the top left corner. You can then copy the alias and paste it into the email registration field of a website or app.
