In a stunning display of listening to its users, Apple has reversed a planned change to its Hide My Email feature that would have made it about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.

Hide My Email, for the uninitiated (and the non-iCloud+ subscribers), lets paying customers generate a unique, disposable email address to hand out to websites instead of their real one, with messages still routed to their regular inbox. The whole point is that these generated addresses look just like regular @icloud.com addresses, so websites can't tell them apart from the real deal. Sure, Apple can still unmask you for law enforcement if they come knocking, but that's a feature, not a bug - unless you're doing something particularly interesting.

Earlier this year, Apple announced it would switch users to @private.icloud.com, which is about as subtle as a neon sign reading 'THIS IS A FAKE EMAIL, PLEASE BLOCK ME.' Users on social media and Reddit, predictably, lost their collective minds, pointing out that this would make it trivially easy for websites to reject these addresses during sign-ups, thereby defeating the entire purpose of the service.

On Monday, Apple confirmed that Hide My Email addresses will remain on @icloud.com, performing a U-turn that would make a politician blush. The company didn't offer a reason for the reversal, but John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who first reported the about-face, suggested that Apple employees had been objecting to the change all along. Because apparently, even inside the hallowed halls of Cupertino, some people understand that a privacy feature should actually provide privacy.

This isn't the first time Hide My Email has had a rough year. Earlier, 404 Media reported that a bug in the feature could leak users' real email addresses when emails were rejected as spam. Apple fixed that bug, but only after more than a year of knowing about it. Better late than never, we suppose, but it's a bit like patching a leaky boat after it's already sunk.

So, congratulations to Apple for eventually doing the right thing, and to the users who shouted loudly enough to be heard. May your inboxes remain full of forwarded spam, but your real addresses remain a mystery.