Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/8/2.html

52•cdrnsf•2h ago

Comments

bantunes•1h ago

I assume for the same reason the OS pings Cupertino when you run a binary - surveillance, masquerading as protection.

SoftTalker•1h ago

Yes, the safe assumption is that Apple reads all your mail. Not that any other provider is better---most are probably worse.

bantunes•1h ago

I don't think they read all of it. Probably just metadata. But would be good to know what's being sent.

tjoff•42m ago

"Not that any other provider is better"

Is that your pretend justification for buying apple?

Barbing•20m ago

Figure they do it for three-letter agencies who’re not in my threat model, otherwise I’d have to spend much time busying with… Whonix? Tails? Qubes?

And lose/reimplement my Universal Clipboard and AirDrop and iMessage… (so yeah I deserve consequences of my love of convenience)

Though the more Apple fails to choose the good soap the more I should worry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074631

tjoff•1m ago

I don't think you have to look far nor hard for a mail-client that doesn't communicate with the developer because you send an email...

Universal Clipboard, AirDrop and iMessage - is that really the value add of apple? iMessage... do we really want to encourage that behavior?

zikduruqe•12m ago

For a company who hangs their hat on privacy, it is a dang shame that their native mail client can't support PGP/GnuPG. I mean it'll do S/MIME, but who uses that regularly.

transcriptase•54m ago

Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.

dylan604•6m ago

OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.

speak_plainly•44m ago

Probably Handoff and cross-device application state syncing.

artisinal•12m ago

Most likely answer so far. While writing an email you can take it over between iPhone, iPad and Mac. Once you hit send it probably gives a “you can stop Handoff now” signal.

zer0zzz•34m ago

Everyone wearing their tinfoil hat while using Gmail and drive for everything

cynicalsecurity•23m ago

Gmail doesn't pretend to be private.

Barbing•18m ago

Jeff Johnson is an Apple privacy information hero and deserves every penny for his apps like StopTheMadness https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness

kridsdale1•9m ago

One Apple Mail feature nobody here has commented on was called Piano Mover internally. I don’t know the public marketing name. It lets attachments over 10MB in emails be replaced with iCloud hosted file references.

datakan•9m ago

Isn't this Private Relay masking your IP? https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

The article calls out Safari but my understanding is it applies to email also.

Barbing•8m ago

Why’s this post below an older less popular one? https://i.ibb.co/jnpcFJz/IMG-0549.jpg

Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

Devtools must be open source

MiniMax H3 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI: Open Weights, Native Audio, and 2K Video

Taylor Farms Has Rewritten Its Cyclospora Statement Four Times in Sixteen Days

Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood

Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs

Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

Don't be a meat proxy

Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU

Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

Show HN: Product analytics (and evals) for agent sessions on your MCP

Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros

The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town

Explanation of INT8 ConvRot (FP8 is no longer needed)

Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone

Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

Rust project goals: Immobile types and guaranteed destructors

Texas Police Used 83,000 Flock Cameras to Hunt Down a Woman Who Had an Abortion

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)

Walk on Decomposed Subdomains

What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not

Train Simulator Controller

Kraid is a now a real compiler

Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks

Octane – React's programming model, compiled

Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?

Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?

Comments

Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

Devtools must be open source

MiniMax H3 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI: Open Weights, Native Audio, and 2K Video

Taylor Farms Has Rewritten Its Cyclospora Statement Four Times in Sixteen Days

Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood

Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs

Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

Don't be a meat proxy

Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU

Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

Show HN: Product analytics (and evals) for agent sessions on your MCP

Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros

The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town

Explanation of INT8 ConvRot (FP8 is no longer needed)

Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone

Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

Rust project goals: Immobile types and guaranteed destructors

Texas Police Used 83,000 Flock Cameras to Hunt Down a Woman Who Had an Abortion

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)

Walk on Decomposed Subdomains

What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not

Train Simulator Controller

Kraid is a now a real compiler

Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks

Octane – React's programming model, compiled

Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?