[tjames7000]

Okay, I see what you mean. We never paid attention to whether (1) was happening. I imagine Apple can tell based on the code that was running at the time.

Even in case (1), isn't it possible that Hide My Email bounces happen differently from regular @icloud.com bounces despite being on the same domain?

We've also been wondering whether Hide My Email was ever responsible for generating the messages with meant-to-be-hidden addresses or whether it was only passing them along and failing to hide them. I don't think we have enough information to tell.

[js2]

> Even in case (1), isn't it possible that Hide My Email bounces happen differently from regular @icloud.com bounces despite being on the same domain?

I don't think so because when I examine the headers of an HME delivered message to my [e-mail] address there's only a single MTA involved.

> We've also been wondering whether Hide My Email was ever responsible for generating the messages with meant-to-be-hidden addresses or whether it was only passing them along and failing to hide them. I don't think we have enough information to tell.

The full headers of the bounce message will tell you.

[tjames7000]

We don't have full headers, unfortunately. I'm not very familiar with SMTP, but to test things out, we ended up running a minimal custom mail server with the nodejs 'net' module to have full control over responses. I think it'd be possible to set something similar up so that the same mail server handles Hide My Email and normal iCloud addresses differently.

  const net = require('net')
  
  const server = net.createServer((socket) => {
   socket.setEncoding('utf8')
   socket.write('220 ...')
  
   socket.on('data', (data) => {
    if (isHideMyEmail(data)) {
     // handle one way
    } else {
     // handle another way
    }
   })
  
   ...
  })
  
  server.listen(25, '0.0.0.0', () => {
   console.log(`Ready for incoming emails`)
  });

That being said, I have no idea how Hide My Email works technically. Maybe the headers would make it clearer.