I've been using this pattern for years.<p>I have a custom domain just for signups, and I sign up with [service].[username]@customdomain. The domain simply has a catchall email "accounts@customdomain"<p>Combined with a password manager (Bitwarden) this is absolutely brilliant.<p>* Spam: if I get any spam, I know exactly which company is responsible, whether directly, through selling user data or because of breaches. And I can simply block the whole alias.<p>* Multiple accounts: If you need a second account with some service, you simply use a new alias. No need to worry about secondary emails just for a few accounts.<p>* Mitigate data leaks: if some database gets compromised, all they get is a throwaway email. They also can't try to log in to other accounts or do password resets if they get a hold of the password. (somewhat redundant with a password manager and unique passwords, but still)<p>* Privacy: all those ad data aggregators have a harder time connecting me between accounts. (of course they still use names, address, credit card info, etc; but it helps)<p>* Easy self-hosting: email hosting can be a pain. But in this case you only need to receive, never send. And receiving basically always works, even with the most broken email server setup.<p>A downside is the unique domain name. I always wanted a shared domain with lots of users to further reduce exposure.<p>I actually thought about starting a service that provides this, but it's a niche product with non-trivial technical hurdles and potentially lots of support demands, so I'm happy that Mozilla is offering this.<p>The only downside is that people get really confused when they have to deal with your email, for example when calling support. But it's never been a real issue.<p>Highly recommended!
I'm conflicted about this.<p>For me, the best implementation of private alias is the Apple one: %randomwords%[at]icloud.com. It's way harder to wildcard block <i>[at]icloud.com, as there are legit users of the icloud domain, than a wildcard block for: </i>[at]mozmail.com.<p>Unfortunately, using the apple implementation is just one more stone into their walled garden. I really wish firefox could create a legit free [at]firefox (or something else) mail and then create this alias service as premium bundle. It would be way harder for services to start blocking it.<p>Furthermore, I'm not really excited to the overall direction that Mozilla is moving with its side projects:<p>1. They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support.<p>2. They created an awesome private file sharing service (firefox send) and quickly butchered it.<p>3. They have a vpn that is simply mullvad with new clothes and fewer geographic availability. Why anyone would use it instead of mullvad is beyond me.<p>Mozilla needs some serious trust building before I trust it to manage several mail aliases for me.
Relay is very cool but it took me like 24 hours since discovering and adopting it, to being unable to use it for an account. So I cannot recommend it to my family and friends who are much less tech literate than I am.<p>In my case I was trying to create an account on the Linux Mint Forums [1]. The confirmation email never arrived, which was very confusing to me.<p>[1]: <a href="https://forums.linuxmint.com/" rel="nofollow">https://forums.linuxmint.com/</a><p>After a couple emails with the admin, they told me this:<p>> <i>The forum tried sending you the activation email but it'd rejected by the Firefox relay with this message:</i><p><pre><code> <...@relay.firefox.com>: host
inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com[54.240.252.212] said: 550 5.7.1 TLS
required by recipient (in reply to RCPT TO command)
</code></pre>
> <i>This is a known issue of the Firefox relay: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757</a>. I'll check but I think TLS is not under our control, same as in the linked issue.</i><p>> <i>For now I think you'll have to use a different email address.</i><p>So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses...
This is cool, however, personally I feel like for my use case that integration with 1Password and Fastmail is better because I don't want to depend on a browser that I cannot use everywhere to manage this.<p>In the same way that I avoid Sign in with Apple - what am I supposed to do when I need to Sign in without Apple?!<p>I find 1P+FM is a much more cross-platform solution.<p>However, I commend Firefox for creating this functionality for people that don't use a separate password manager or Fastmail!
You can only hope that the service will last long enough and not be discontinued like Firefox Send. Otherwise you have created online accounts with dead alias emails. I create the alias mail addresses in my postfix installation under /etc/aliases
Country limited...<i>sight</i>:<p>"Relay Premium is available in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Ireland. "
(<a href="https://relay.firefox.com/faq" rel="nofollow">https://relay.firefox.com/faq</a>)
What happens when the service is discontinued, and suddenly I won't receive any emails from potentially hundreds of accounts?<p>Seems like a really bad idea to rely on this service.
This sounds interesting, and I'd pay for it, but it seems to be dependent on a Firefox extension.<p>Sadly, after literally 20+ years of using Firefox, I recently switched to Brave. The performance of FF was wearing on me.<p>I realize it would seem to be very strange if Mozilla were to create a Chromium extension. But in this case, it is a paid service separate from the browser.
> Your own email domain youremail@yourdomain.mozmail.com<p>I don't understand why would one want to pay for a step down in privacy, voluntarily adding an identifier that allows to track them. The only thing it does is adding some extra information about the alias owner - something that does not make any sense to me, given that the whole point of the service is to obscure users' identities.<p>I would understand really using my own domain (not this falsey advertising - "foo.mozmail.com" is not something I "own") rather than Mozilla-provided subdomain of theirs. Yea, that would also counter the privacy but at least there's a tradeoff - I retain control of that domain, so if I'm unhappy with Mozilla I still have the email addresses.
This looked interesting when I explored it, but the 150KB attachment size limit is too low. I also checked the GitHub issues list for this project and found some open issues with respect to attachment sizes lower than this not getting through (maybe because of inflation with encoding, which end users may not know about or can’t predict).<p>The premium paid subscription is said to be only available in specific countries, but the payment form seems to appear in other places too. So I’m not sure how the service allows or disallows subscriptions.<p>A quick thought also occurred to me comparing this with iCloud email aliases from Apple, which is available for all paid iCloud subscriptions starting at the same price as this one ($0.99 per month) and allows the user to use their custom domain (Firefox relay premium gives you one custom subdomain under mozmail.com).
And for the same price, Apple also provides 50GB of storage and supports the iCloud Relay hop service for Safari (and apps, if supported).<p>I’d like to support Firefox monetarily, assuming the revenue from this service goes to Mozilla Corporation (not Mozilla Foundation) and to Firefox. But the attachment size limit is currently unacceptable for me.
Urgh, on one hand i love the idea and i think its a good business venture for mozilla.<p>On the other hand, they are injecting little scare bubbles into everybody's website to advertise this, and that rubs me up the wrong way so much i want nothing to do with it.
I just signed up and sent myself a test email. It took a couple of minutes but it came through with banners above and below the content.<p>Pretty nice service however again I am afraid that one day the plug will be pulled and the email addresses will be orphaned.
Mozilla, I want to give you money and subscribe,
Yet you refuse with this ambiguit error:<p>The currency of this subscription is not valid for the country associated with your payment.<p>Try again
I created a subdomain, and create email on fly based on the domain name example ycombinator@subdomain.com<p>I use <a href="https://improvmx.com/" rel="nofollow">https://improvmx.com/</a> to forward all subdomain email to my main email (gmail) account. It has a option to forward emails to a black hole too.<p>From that I have learned that big companies like adobe & lendingtree gets hacked too. Or they sell your data.
So this is anonaddy but with unlimited replies?
Pretty cool!
I just signed up for purelymail recently, I wish I had heard of this sooner, but it's better than never.<p>Is there any way to create aliases on the fly?<p>Something like creating a new alias automatically when an email is received?
What the f. Do they even want users. I can <i>not</i> create a Firefox Account. Every register page is a login page. When I enter an email and a password it expects an existing account (which I do not have). This is beyond belief.
I've been using Spamgourmet for over a decade for this functionality. I'm surprised it's not more popular here.<p><a href="https://spamgourmet.com" rel="nofollow">https://spamgourmet.com</a>
I've been using SimpleLogin for a while now which does just this. The thing I like about SimpleLogin, is that it can be self-hosted and they have an open source app on F-Droid.
I made this as a side project a while back. The issue I ran into is my server being blocked to send due to its ASN even though it only sends to my addresses.