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The New iPhone Feature That Protects You from Spam

‘Hide My Email’ that lets you create burner email addresses and protect against spam emails — if you subscribe to iCloud.

tech roundupGear Patrol

By Tucker Bowe

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We’ve all been there. Giving out our personal email to websites and services only to instantly regret it because of all the spam emails — in the form of daily promotions and newsletters — they send us. Yes, you can unsubscribe to each of these spam emails individually after the fact, but that’s tedious nobody really wants to spend time doing that.

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Fortunately if you have an iPhone, the latest software update — iOS 15 — is giving it a way to get ahead and fight these spam emails. It’s a new privacy feature called Hide My Email and it allows you to create burner email addresses, which are anonymous email address that forwards emails to your real email address, so that you don’t get bombarded by spam emails in the feature. And your real email address can retain some semblance of privacy.

There are two catches to using this new Hide My Email feature. First, you need to have an iPhone that supports iOS 15, meaning you have to have an iPhone that was released in the last seven years (iPhone 6s or later). And second, you have to be a paying subscriber to iCloud, which starts at $1/month and gives you extra storage. If you don’t pay for iCloud — not everybody does because Apple gives 5GB of free iCloud storage — then you unfortunately can’t take advantage of this new feature.

How to create a burner email on your iPhone

It’s easy and only requires a few quick steps. Remember, you need to have the iOS 15 update on your iPhone, otherwise you won’t have the option of the Hide My Email feature

  1. Open the Settings app.
  2. Select the tab at the top with your Apple ID name.
  3. Select iCloud.
  4. Select Hide My Email.
  5. Select “+ Create New Address”.

From here, all you have to do is fill out the form for your burner email address and, once created, it will forward emails to the email address that’s associated with your Apple ID account.

If you want to get emails forwarded from your burner account to a different email address, all you have to do is follow the same steps as above, only once you select Hide My Email, scroll down to the Forward To option.

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