What is icloud-hme?

icloud-hme is a self-hosted tool, written in Go, for managing Apple's Hide My Email feature from outside the iCloud apps. According to its Chinese-language README, it works by reverse-engineering iCloud's web interface and using the IMAP email protocol, letting a user create new hidden email aliases, list the ones they already have, and fetch the messages sent to them. The tool runs as a small HTTP server with a JSON API. It can create an alias, list all aliases for an account, deactivate or reactivate one, delete one, and read incoming mail for a given alias. For reading mail, it tries an IMAP connection using an Apple app-specific password first, since that lets it search by recipient on the mail server itself, and falls back to reading through the web API with a browser cookie if no app password is set up. It also supports managing several iCloud accounts side by side, each with its own credentials. Getting it running means either downloading a prebuilt binary for your platform, pulling a Docker image, or compiling it yourself with Go 1.26 or newer. Accounts are configured through a JSON file or through the API itself, and the tool needs either exported browser cookies from a signed-in iCloud session or an Apple-generated app password, depending on which features are used. Cookies typically expire after about a day, according to the README's troubleshooting notes, so they need to be refreshed periodically. The project uses the Gin web framework for its HTTP API, a Go IMAP library for mail, and a TLS fingerprinting library to avoid being blocked by iCloud's anti-scraping defenses. Because it needs real account credentials to work, anyone using it should treat those credentials, and the tool's own API, as sensitive.