Apple collects the email address of every incoming & outgoing email even if iCloud mail is off

[bmac89]

Edit: I changed the thread title as it appears Apple does indeed collect every incoming and outgoing email adddress when you use Apple mail app and this occurs even if iCloud mail is switched off!

https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup...adata-for-years-on-their-servers-2a61b1a3232d

Hello,

I used the privacy.apple.com website to request and download my data, more out of curiosity than anything else. Everything was as expected with the exception of one file which surprised me “Other data > Apple Features Using iCloud > Mail > Recents.xml”

The file listed the email address of every sent and received email even if I never responded or sent an email to that address. It also has a date which would relate to the first occurrence of this address.
It also states the original source which is either “.com.apple.mail” or “.com.apple.mobilemail”.

This information goes all the way back to 2009 when I first bought a Mac. What is so surprising about this is that I never used any iCloud features until 2016 when I got an iPad, infact iCloud isn’t even available on the version of macOSX on my MacBook. Also I never used iCloud Mail and only have Notes, Safari & game centre switched on.

Can someone enlighten me on this circumstance? It seems as though the Apple Mail app logs all incoming & outgoing email addresses and this occurs regardless of whether you have iCloud - surely that is not the case!?
The incoming and outgoing email servers on the Mail app are the ones provided by my email service provider.

Also the file name “recents” is rather ironic considering the timeframe of the data contained.

Thanks

 

[370zulu]

I am curious of this as well and will conduct an experiment. I used the javascript that is referenced (on github) and was able to purge the recents in my icloud account. Very helpful as I have been looking for a way to do this forever! I plan to send a bunch of emails from an email address using my outlook.com email address using the Microsoft iOS app for Outlook and I will send different ones from the the same outlook account connected through the Mail app itself. I am curious which ones will be kept in recents.