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

Re:Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iClou... by kridsdale1 on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:34PM (#49158033)

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.

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Re:Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iClou... by pinkyboy on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:58PM (#49158406)

the marketing name is "Mail Drop", and it is separate from iCloud mail; though it should only fire if there's a 20mb+ attachment on the email.

cloudd is used by a shit-ton of services though, so I'm not sure how to track it down without better tracing of what actually initiated the call, or the contents of the call.

edit: tomasf nailed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388

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Re:Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iClou... by Onavo on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:51PM (#49158275)

I think every major email hosting provider (that's not a dumb IMAP only platform) has some variant of this.

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Re:Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iClou... by VogonPoetry on Monday August 03, 2026 @06:40PM (#49162375)

I wonder if "Piano Mover" is a reference to the Goon Show episode called "Napoleon’s Piano" [1]

If you like absurdly silly comedy; Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, you should track these down. These were made in the 1950's for BBC Radio.

[1] https://goonshow.org/goonshow/s6p4/

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