IMO if you're really concerned about anonymity and securing your email from credential-stuffing, and willing to pay for such a service (I used to pay for 33mail), it's easier to just buy a domain and route * to your inbox.<p>It won't get banned by some services, you have complete control over the domain and account, you can send email from any address you wish, you can sign up for domain-wide haveibeenpwned alerts by verifying domain ownership via TXT records, and you don't have to worry about the service going out of business in 2 years.<p>After going through my password manager last year and changing as many logins and emails as I could, I've found several services that have sold my email address to third parties and one that was hacked. It's a relief to know I don't have all my proverbial email eggs in one basket.
And what happens when FireFox decides to drop this option 1-2 years into the future? I reckon they'll give time to change the email address on all the pages one used it for, but still...<p>nvm, it's in the FAQ:<p>"What happens if Mozilla shuts down the Firefox Relay service?<p>We will give you advance notice that you need to change the email address of any accounts that are using Relay aliases."<p>Note that one cannot reply using this service (yet). So the whole anonymity is gone as soon as one wants to contact some service without disclosing the real address (?)
I encourage you to instead try out <a href="https://forwardemail.net" rel="nofollow">https://forwardemail.net</a>. I'm launching our browser extension and our SMTP service very soon. It's completely open-source and free. No logging either. We're the only service that doesn't write emails let alone logs to disk nor store any metadata.<p>You can use unlimited custom domains and create disposable aliases on the fly as well!<p>(I'm the creator, lmk any questions!)
I generate long completely random aliases also for other reason: to help with phishing detection.<p>I store aliases in DB along with a short description of to whom they were issued, and some extra flags. My mail client then highlights emails sent to these aliases in green color and shows their description instead of the alias itself in the "From" column of the message list.<p>I always give random aliases to online services, eshops, shipping companies, etc. These private aliases will never receive SPAM, or phishing, unless leaked by the company.<p>Anything that looks like a transactional email from some service, and is not sent to private alias, just gets deleted right away. It's not even worth opening, no matter how good it looks.<p>And I can keep my phishing guard up on much lower volume of green emails. It also makes whitelisting transactional email easier, without allowing random SPAM to the Inbox, because filtering based on the "shared secret" per company delivery address will allow in all important email from the company, regardless of how or from what address it was sent.
Services like this usually get banned by a lot of websites for various reasons. One solution could be to rotate domains from time to time, but I doubt they gonna do this.
Here is the list of permission the extension requires:<p>- Access your data for all web sites<p>If even the browser vendor can't do better than requesting access to everything I'm not surprised that we end up with extensions being sold and abused (for their permissions).
> Firefox Relay supports email forwarding (including attachments) of email up to 150KB in size<p>> Any emails larger than 150KB will not be forwarded.<p>I'm not sure what to think of the size limitation. I wonder what percentage of emails are under that.
I have been using AnonAddy[0] for this, with great results. I initially used Firefox Relay, but switched to get more than 5 aliases. AnonAddy also recently added support for replies.<p>[0] <a href="https://anonaddy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://anonaddy.com/</a>
Ages ago I used "Bigfoot"'s <i>free email forwarding for life</i>. Which turned into a subset of email with limitations, fees, ads, and eventually shutdown.<p>Later I had my own domain, and did the address-per-site thing. Which was an absolute nightmare to undo when I sold the domain (grepping thru the raw self-hosted mbox and logging into and changing my email on hundreds of sites), although it was a great excuse to get going on using a password manager.<p>At this point I could use "plus addressing" at Fastmail (e.g. amazon+me@domain.com), but I find the endeavor pretty pointless. My spam is low, and I never once found it especially valuable to be able to identify or isolate an offending domain.<p>I don't expect that Firefox will go "full Bigfoot" on this one in terms of ads and fees but shutdown is a PITA risk. I would personally only use this kind of stuff for genuine one-offs where anonymity is paramount (read: probably not at all).
Another option for an email relay service is the venerable Spamgourmet[0]. I'm a long time-user (a decade at least) and according to the site "Your message stats: 11,298 forwarded, 27,539 eaten. You have 172 spamgourmet address(es)." I haven't had too many problems with the service, mainly the problems are with third-parties that block the spamgourmet.com domain but there are alternate, more obscure domain names that can be used (such as @xoxy.net IIRC).<p>There are plusses and minuses to SG, but it's free as in beer and if your Perl and ops chops are in good shape the code is available for self-hosting. The hosted service does not support bringing your own domain but has other nifty features that might appeal to HN power users. Worth a look if you're in the market for this kind of thing.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl" rel="nofollow">https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl</a>
I've set something like this up with Google Domains + Gmail for free (well, the yearly cost of the domain, but yeah)<p>I was able to set up alias emails in my gmail & have all emails from a particular domain forward to my domain as well.<p>Then went with a password manager & changed all my email addresses to my own domain with specific relays (amazon@ netflix@ etc etc)<p>Works really well for ~12/year!
I like the idea. But relay.firefox.com could have been shorter, I suppose it doesn’t matter here because the extension is supposed to roll you a new one and paste it in. But I’d like a service with a shorter domain for reading to people over the phone or at a store, double especially when it’s a throwaway anyhow.
Is this something similar to <a href="https://simplelogin.io/" rel="nofollow">https://simplelogin.io/</a>? If it is, simplelogin is a self-hostable solution. If you're really worried about privacy, this would cut out the possibility that Mozilla might be reading your messages.
I installed the extension. Turns out you only get 5 aliases which makes it kinda useless.<p>Also, it seems to forward to the address associated with your firefox account (which could end up at a mailprovider you don't want the relayed emails to go to)<p>I'll stick with my own *@sub.example.com forwarding setup in stead.
Cool, the source is available: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay</a><p>Edit: I've previously claimed it to be open source. But there's no License currently that would indicate that.
I built Owl Mail [<a href="https://owlmail.io" rel="nofollow">https://owlmail.io</a>] to solve this same problem. I think you will find Owl Mail a fast and easy to use alternative to FF relay.<p>Congrats to FF Relay – more products in this space will be a win for better privacy online :)
I don't know. It's so easy to just create a random Gmail address and forward email from it. Maybe this makes it easier, but Gmail is one of the few Google products that I feel pretty confident will be around for a long time.
There's a self-hostable alternative called Inboxen (<a href="https://inboxen.org/" rel="nofollow">https://inboxen.org/</a>) I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, unfortunately.
Similar to Apple's option <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425</a>
That's nice and convenient, Mozilla, but <i>Firefox the browser</i> is an essential piece of software at this point. How about focusing your precious cash on that?
Good luck when this service goes down. But otherwise: Sounds great!<p>Questions:<p>1. Is this new?<p>2. Why just 5 relays? How can I get more?<p>3. Is something like that available from 1Password? Would be a great addition.
So, the same idea that is <a href="https://sneakemail.com" rel="nofollow">https://sneakemail.com</a> ?<p>(happy user for like 12 years?)