17 ms·

Firefox Relay

310 points by blacktulip 5y ago

ranguna 5y ago
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. Is there any way to create aliases on the fly? Something like creating a new alias automatically when an email is received?
- Vinnl 5y ago
  The extension allows you to create aliases on the fly (although the free version has a limit of 5 aliases total). Note that the extension is at this time only available for Firefox on desktop. Alternatively, if you have a Premium subscription, you can set up a catchall subdomain for yourself, so that e.g. anyarbitraryidentifier@ranguna.mozmail.com gets forward to you without having to create the alias in advance. Of course, this has the disadvantage of being able to associate that alias with other aliases you create.
sebow 5y ago
Hell no I ain't touching this with a 10feet pole. Would rather try and struggle to live email-free than create a profile of addresses which mozilla would have.Don't get me wrong still a step above google, zuck & cook, but people who think this is the solution are delusional, even if this service is for non-critical emails.
pm90 5y ago
Won’t websites just blacklist this domain from creating accounts?
- decrypt 5y ago
  It's rare though. I have been using alias services like Anonaddy and SimpleLogin for nearly two years. I have seen only on website block SimpleLogin, and it was a Pixelfed instance. I simply signed up on another Pixelfed instance as these are federated. These alias companies also have multiple domains, so in a way these blocks can be worked around.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    About a year after Gmail launched, commercial services blocked the domain for account registration, in droves. I remember seeing errors about using "free" email services. It hasn't happened yet me in a long time but I also use a wildcard address and a personal domain for most things now. (My gmail account is regularly blocked but that's becaue people assume it's fake and they use it for testing... I get all the spam.)
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    Mailinator's domains are pretty much all blocked in lots of cases. There are lists filled with such domains that services often seem to use.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      Mailinator is very famous. I never heard about the other services in this sub thread though. It could be that they are allowed because few people know that they exist.
- makosdv 5y ago
  Some probably will.
  - otherme123 5y ago
    I've find a good amount of sites that do not blacklist, but whitelist maybe four or five domains (gmail, hotmail, outlook...) and any others not allowed.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Cat v Mouse
hsx 5y ago
Doesn’t seem like I can sign up in Australia, payment is not accepted..
- Vinnl 5y ago
  (Relay engineer here.) Unfortunately the Premium service that we launched yesterday is only available in a limited (but growing) number of countries. The free version should be available to you though.
MrksHfmn 5y ago
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
- bambax 5y ago
  I have domains with catchall so every email is different, can be created on the fly and can be easily revoked. This is the simplest solution I think.
  - checkyoursudo 5y ago
    If you rely on catchall, doesn't that make it more difficult to eliminate spam from breaches or bad actor companies/services? With aliases and no catchall, I just delete a one-time-use alias and all spam goes away. Can you do something similar even if you are using catchall?
    - the8472 5y ago
      With a catchall you can just setup a filter rule that auto-deletes mails to certain destination addresses and add more to the filter as they get compromised. Which doesn't even happen all that often in my experience.
    - newhotelowner 5y ago
      instead of domain, use subdomain. You can use forwarding service like improvmx to filter out bad actors. Also, forward email to Gmail. Gmail will reject standard spam emails.
- paleogizmo 5y ago
  I’m cautious, but IIRC much of the issue with Firefox send was it being abused for huge/illegal files, which seems like less of an issue with a receive-only email address.
antihero 5y ago
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. 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?! I find 1P+FM is a much more cross-platform solution. However, I commend Firefox for creating this functionality for people that don't use a separate password manager or Fastmail!
- Lio 5y ago
  Right with you on Fastmail, it's excellent. Just wondering though where do you feel you can't use Firefox? As far as I know it runs on all major platforms even if the rendering engine on iOS is still Safari.
  - antihero 5y ago
    I find on iOS it just isn't as well integrated as using Safari. Also, apps. Edit: I am trying it again and it seems a lot better integrated than when I last tried - you can set it as your default browser! Is there a reliable way to block ads, though?
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Sign In with Apple is a regular OAuth service and works fine in a browser.
- ssalazars 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would still need to pay $3 USD/mo for Fastmail even if you use 1P. Whereas with Relay, it's 0.99 USD/mo, and no need to migrate my existing email to any other service.
  - antihero 5y ago
    Well yes, it is much better if you already use Fastmail.
- 5y ago
llampx 5y ago
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. Pretty nice service however again I am afraid that one day the plug will be pulled and the email addresses will be orphaned.
- toeknee0 5y ago
  Hi! I'm the Product Manager on Relay. Thank you for sharing your concerns, we absolutely understand this risk and the investment and trust it takes to sign up for a service like Firefox Relay. We're actively investing resourcing into our privacy and security products like VPN and Relay and hope to grow these services while providing more protections to more people. I hope that you can come along with us and try out Relay.
  - llampx 5y ago
    At least one service I use has already blocked @mozmail.com addresses, unfortunately. Without a more common/generic TLD this is dead in the water.
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
I'm conflicted about this. For me, the best implementation of private alias is the Apple one: %randomwords%[at]icloud.com. It's way harder to wildcard block [at]icloud.com, as there are legit users of the icloud domain, than a wildcard block for: [at]mozmail.com. 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. Furthermore, I'm not really excited to the overall direction that Mozilla is moving with its side projects: 1. They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support. 2. They created an awesome private file sharing service (firefox send) and quickly butchered it. 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. Mozilla needs some serious trust building before I trust it to manage several mail aliases for me.
- bambax 5y ago
  Agreed. They are all over the place and don't take good care of the only important thing, which is the browser. If I want a vpn, I will get a vpn. Same with email alias. This is yet another distraction. I'm not very optimistic.
  - nabakin 5y ago
    I think they have a revenue issue. They can't make the money necessary to sustain a lot of their work so they are trying to find other sources of revenue that are privacy focused to help. See the layoffs from last year for example.
  - dralley 5y ago
    The problem is that half the commenters in any given thread about Mozilla say things like "they're too dependent on Google for revenue" and the other half say things like "they have too many side-projects, they should just focus on Firefox" and some select few complain about both simultaneously. Pocket, VPN, and Relay are all revenue generating and probably don't require that much effort to run.
- 5y ago
MickyTheMouse 5y ago
You can create aliases on Gmail with "+". firstname.lastname+spam@gmail.com. Probably works with other email providers too.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  This is a standard and every semi-smart spammer can strip the "\+.+" part so it works only with legit websites that you want to handle in a special way.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Fastmail has subdomain addressing [0] to solve that. whateveryoulike@username.domain.tld is the same as username+whateveryoulike@domain.tld [0]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plus-addressing-and-subdomain-addressing https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      So, spammers will learn to look at the "domain.tld" at one moment if this gets popular.
      - quiet_cool 5y ago
        another options is to buy a domain with a cpanel and set up a forwarder and filter to a specific folder in your secret main email account. The extra benefit here, since you own the domain, is that you can create a send identity of your arbitraryforwardingaddress@yourdomain.tld
- extra88 5y ago
  Yes, that is standard subaddressing but not all email providers support it (I've never heard of a Microsoft Exchange server supporting it). One problem with it is it exposes your real email address. Another problem, as the Wikipedia article notes, is there are a lot of inputs with poorly written validation that won't accept '+' as a valid email address character (they often only allow a-z, '.', and '@'). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing
batch12 5y ago
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.
lovestory 5y ago
So is this like craigslist email censor?
the_duke 5y ago
I've been using this pattern for years. 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" Combined with a password manager (Bitwarden) this is absolutely brilliant. * 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. * 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. * 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) * 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) * 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. A downside is the unique domain name. I always wanted a shared domain with lots of users to further reduce exposure. 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. 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. Highly recommended!
- ryanjshaw 5y ago
  Word of advice for anybody doing this: make sure you have a way to SEND email using one of your aliased addresses - because one day you will find a critical service provider can't process your emailed attachments unless sent from your registered email address (e.g. insurance claim document, bank documents, etc.)
  - nathancahill 5y ago
    If it's handled by Google Workspace, it's easy to add additional "Send as" addresses.
  - 5y ago
akdor1154 5y ago
Urgh, on one hand i love the idea and i think its a good business venture for mozilla. 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.
- opencl 5y ago
  You only get the bubbles if you install the extension.
- groovecoder 5y ago
  Howdy. I'm an engineer on both Facebook Container and Relay. We fixed the original bug in Facebook Container that was showing the prompt on every website - now it only shows the prompt on websites where Facebook trackers are detected. Facebook Container is something that inspired and influenced the development of Relay in the first place. Facebook Container users reported that they used websites and still saw ads from those websites in their Facebook feed, even though they were using Facebook Container. Because Facebook lets anyone create custom audiences for re-targeting, we need to give users a way to protect themselves from "back end" data sharing & tracking. (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/744354708981227?id=2469097953376494 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/744354708981227?id=24...)
duquedeturing 5y ago
Country limited...sight: "⁨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. " (https://relay.firefox.com/faq https://relay.firefox.com/faq)
- Vinnl 5y ago
  (Relay engineer here.) Note that that's for the Premium service - the free tier is available in most countries. We're hoping to expand to more countries in the future.
- cuonic 5y ago
  Tried signing up for Relay Premium (from France), Stripe is telling me that "The currency of this subscription isn't valid for the country associated with your payment"...
  - toeknee0 5y ago
    Hi! I'm the Product Manager on Relay. I'm sorry about this! We've deployed a fix this morning. Let us know if you're still having this issue and we can help troubleshoot it further.
    - ghosters 5y ago
      I'm having same issues with PayPal as option, coming from Finland Edit: looking FAQ it appears it's not even available in Finland, I'm active user of relay and i saw the upgrade option, not reading the FAQ at all.
endisneigh 5y ago
simplest thing is to create a gmail, which will never be blocked. then forward certain types of emails to your regular email.
funOtter 5y ago
See competitors like https://simplelogin.io/ https://simplelogin.io/
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Some notable differences: * SimpleLogin can be self-hosted and is open source * Has an open source app available in the F-Droid open source app store
- oftenwrong 5y ago
  also https://anonaddy.com/ https://anonaddy.com/
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Also https://www.33mail.com/ https://www.33mail.com/
j1elo 5y ago
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. 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. [1]: https://forums.linuxmint.com/ https://forums.linuxmint.com/ After a couple emails with the admin, they told me this: > The forum tried sending you the activation email but it'd rejected by the Firefox relay with this message: <...@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) > This is a known issue of the Firefox relay: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757 https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757. I'll check but I think TLS is not under our control, same as in the linked issue. > For now I think you'll have to use a different email address. So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses...
- groovecoder 5y ago
  (Tech lead of Relay here) Thanks for the detail! We'll look into this. We definitely want to maximize deliverability.
  - j1elo 5y ago
    Thank you very much! Just to make it clear, I still use Relay for those sites that allow me to use it, I just wouldn't recommend it to friends because this kind of hiccups mean that it's not something that one can rely on with blind eyes. Glad to see there is active interest in ironing them out.
  - hokonch 5y ago
    I'm glad to hear it! It's been almost a year since I reported this bug, and I still run into web-compat issues everywhere.
    - groovecoder 5y ago
      Thanks for reporting it! Nothing like an influx of new users (and now premium customers!) to re-light some fire under a bug! We'll work on it.
newhotelowner 5y ago
I created a subdomain, and create email on fly based on the domain name example ycombinator@subdomain.com I use https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/ to forward all subdomain email to my main email (gmail) account. It has a option to forward emails to a black hole too. From that I have learned that big companies like adobe & lendingtree gets hacked too. Or they sell your data.
newscracker 5y ago
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). 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. 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). 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.
- toeknee0 5y ago
  Hi! Product Manager on Relay here. Thank you for the feedback. We're actively working on upping the attachment limit as we know that is a major pain point. I hope that's something we can deliver to you shortly. Please keep the great feedback coming :)
EMM_386 5y ago
This sounds interesting, and I'd pay for it, but it seems to be dependent on a Firefox extension. Sadly, after literally 20+ years of using Firefox, I recently switched to Brave. The performance of FF was wearing on me. 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.
- notRobot 5y ago
  Not dependent on extension: https://relay.firefox.com/ https://relay.firefox.com/
- Vinnl 5y ago
  (Relay engineer here.) While we provide a Firefox extension with which generating an alias is just a click away, you're not dependent on Firefox specifically: you can generate and access your generated alias through the web interface at https://relay.firefox.com https://relay.firefox.com in any browser. (Also, I'm sure you've already tried a lot of things, but in case you didn't: perhaps refreshing Firefox helps? See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a....)
markstos 5y ago
Solving privacy by sharing all your emails [were obscuring your email address matters] with Mozilla.
nagyf 5y ago
What happens when the service is discontinued, and suddenly I won't receive any emails from potentially hundreds of accounts? Seems like a really bad idea to rely on this service.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  the primary use case for me is to generate throwaway registration emails, I wouldn't necessarily use this for anything you really depend on.
havkd 5y ago
Why not just create a burner Gmail address?
- vxNsr 5y ago
  how does that work? Then you need to still sift through all the spam you get... this allows you to prevent the spam from ever arriving.
encryptluks2 5y ago
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.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago
  My issue with SimpleLogin is that they mutate the emails forwarded to your inbox in a manner that breaks features based on the sender. If you're using gmail's email grouping feature it gets thrown off by this. I am not sure how I would go about it, but I would guess that spam detection would become somewhat (more) difficult too.
one_off_comment 5y ago
I like this idea a lot, but I don't trust it to stick around. Mozilla is going to pull a Google and this will be a very painful thing to undo.
rpxio 5y ago
I've been using Spamgourmet for over a decade for this functionality. I'm surprised it's not more popular here. https://spamgourmet.com https://spamgourmet.com
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Never heard of this one. I'd love to get something like this that I can self-host, or pay to use my own domain.
- yborg 5y ago
  I think I've been using it for nearly 15 years. And I selfishly hope it never gets more popular since it's so obscure that it seems to fly under the radar of most blacklists despite its 20+ year history. I like how it keeps a count of all of the messages it's blackholed to a given address so you can see who pimped you like a used car if you use a unique address per signup.
unicornporn 5y ago
What the f. Do they even want users. I can not 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.
- abraham 5y ago
  If it's asking for a password then you do have an account. Try triggering a password reset.
drdaeman 5y ago
> Your own email domain youremail@yourdomain.mozmail.com 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. 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.
- groovecoder 5y ago
  Howdy, relay engineer here. The random aliases at mozmail.com are certainly the most private option. The subdomain aliases are for convenience so you can make up any alias you want even if you don't have a device on you. (e.g., checking into a hotel, etc.) As you say - there's always trade-offs involved.
  - drdaeman 5y ago
    Aah, so the personal subdomains are catch-all accounts? So one doesn't have to talk to the Relay services at all and can just give out whatevertheycanthinkof@yourname.mozmail.com and it would get forwarded? If so - thank you, yes, now I see the point. My bad and please consider telling marketing team to highlight this hotel use case more prominently, because without it just comparing @mozmail.com vs @foo.mozmail.com is not really compelling and could be even confusing.
AbuAssar 5y ago
Mozilla, I want to give you money and subscribe, Yet you refuse with this ambiguit error: The currency of this subscription is not valid for the country associated with your payment. Try again
- ranguna 5y ago
  PM of relay posted a few comments up that they had delivered a fix 2h ago. Try again, it might work this time.
  - toeknee0 5y ago
    Thanks for "relaying" the comment! :) Just to clarify my earlier comment, you should be able to subscribe to premium if you're in the following countries with payment details that match the country: United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Ireland. For users outside these countries, we know that it's not as clear in the experience that premium isn't available yet, and we'll be making updates very shortly to make this more clear. Additionally, we'll continue to try and grow the list of countries that Relay is available in, so please give us your feedback to help us prioritize expansion. Also, the free experience is available globally, if you're not able to subscribe to Premium yet, but still want to use Relay.
stereoradonc 5y ago
Fastmail provides multiple aliases (I have over 400+) and they never seem to have any problem.

310 points by blacktulip 5y ago

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. Is there any way to create aliases on the fly? Something like creating a new alias automatically when an email is received?

Vinnl 5y ago
The extension allows you to create aliases on the fly (although the free version has a limit of 5 aliases total). Note that the extension is at this time only available for Firefox on desktop. Alternatively, if you have a Premium subscription, you can set up a catchall subdomain for yourself, so that e.g. anyarbitraryidentifier@ranguna.mozmail.com gets forward to you without having to create the alias in advance. Of course, this has the disadvantage of being able to associate that alias with other aliases you create.

sebow 5y ago

Hell no I ain't touching this with a 10feet pole. Would rather try and struggle to live email-free than create a profile of addresses which mozilla would have.Don't get me wrong still a step above google, zuck & cook, but people who think this is the solution are delusional, even if this service is for non-critical emails.

pm90 5y ago

Won’t websites just blacklist this domain from creating accounts?

decrypt 5y ago
It's rare though. I have been using alias services like Anonaddy and SimpleLogin for nearly two years. I have seen only on website block SimpleLogin, and it was a Pixelfed instance. I simply signed up on another Pixelfed instance as these are federated. These alias companies also have multiple domains, so in a way these blocks can be worked around.
- igetspam 5y ago
  About a year after Gmail launched, commercial services blocked the domain for account registration, in droves. I remember seeing errors about using "free" email services. It hasn't happened yet me in a long time but I also use a wildcard address and a personal domain for most things now. (My gmail account is regularly blocked but that's becaue people assume it's fake and they use it for testing... I get all the spam.)
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Mailinator's domains are pretty much all blocked in lots of cases. There are lists filled with such domains that services often seem to use.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Mailinator is very famous. I never heard about the other services in this sub thread though. It could be that they are allowed because few people know that they exist.
makosdv 5y ago
Some probably will.
- otherme123 5y ago
  I've find a good amount of sites that do not blacklist, but whitelist maybe four or five domains (gmail, hotmail, outlook...) and any others not allowed.
djbusby 5y ago
Cat v Mouse

hsx 5y ago

Doesn’t seem like I can sign up in Australia, payment is not accepted..

Vinnl 5y ago
(Relay engineer here.) Unfortunately the Premium service that we launched yesterday is only available in a limited (but growing) number of countries. The free version should be available to you though.

MrksHfmn 5y ago

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

bambax 5y ago
I have domains with catchall so every email is different, can be created on the fly and can be easily revoked. This is the simplest solution I think.
- checkyoursudo 5y ago
  If you rely on catchall, doesn't that make it more difficult to eliminate spam from breaches or bad actor companies/services? With aliases and no catchall, I just delete a one-time-use alias and all spam goes away. Can you do something similar even if you are using catchall?
  - the8472 5y ago
    With a catchall you can just setup a filter rule that auto-deletes mails to certain destination addresses and add more to the filter as they get compromised. Which doesn't even happen all that often in my experience.
  - newhotelowner 5y ago
    instead of domain, use subdomain. You can use forwarding service like improvmx to filter out bad actors. Also, forward email to Gmail. Gmail will reject standard spam emails.
paleogizmo 5y ago
I’m cautious, but IIRC much of the issue with Firefox send was it being abused for huge/illegal files, which seems like less of an issue with a receive-only email address.

antihero 5y ago

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. 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?! I find 1P+FM is a much more cross-platform solution. However, I commend Firefox for creating this functionality for people that don't use a separate password manager or Fastmail!

Lio 5y ago
Right with you on Fastmail, it's excellent. Just wondering though where do you feel you can't use Firefox? As far as I know it runs on all major platforms even if the rendering engine on iOS is still Safari.
- antihero 5y ago
  I find on iOS it just isn't as well integrated as using Safari. Also, apps. Edit: I am trying it again and it seems a lot better integrated than when I last tried - you can set it as your default browser! Is there a reliable way to block ads, though?
marcellus23 5y ago
Sign In with Apple is a regular OAuth service and works fine in a browser.
ssalazars 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would still need to pay $3 USD/mo for Fastmail even if you use 1P. Whereas with Relay, it's 0.99 USD/mo, and no need to migrate my existing email to any other service.
- antihero 5y ago
  Well yes, it is much better if you already use Fastmail.
5y ago

llampx 5y ago

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. Pretty nice service however again I am afraid that one day the plug will be pulled and the email addresses will be orphaned.

toeknee0 5y ago
Hi! I'm the Product Manager on Relay. Thank you for sharing your concerns, we absolutely understand this risk and the investment and trust it takes to sign up for a service like Firefox Relay. We're actively investing resourcing into our privacy and security products like VPN and Relay and hope to grow these services while providing more protections to more people. I hope that you can come along with us and try out Relay.
- llampx 5y ago
  At least one service I use has already blocked @mozmail.com addresses, unfortunately. Without a more common/generic TLD this is dead in the water.

arepublicadoceu 5y ago

I'm conflicted about this. For me, the best implementation of private alias is the Apple one: %randomwords%[at]icloud.com. It's way harder to wildcard block [at]icloud.com, as there are legit users of the icloud domain, than a wildcard block for: [at]mozmail.com. 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. Furthermore, I'm not really excited to the overall direction that Mozilla is moving with its side projects: 1. They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support. 2. They created an awesome private file sharing service (firefox send) and quickly butchered it. 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. Mozilla needs some serious trust building before I trust it to manage several mail aliases for me.

bambax 5y ago
Agreed. They are all over the place and don't take good care of the only important thing, which is the browser. If I want a vpn, I will get a vpn. Same with email alias. This is yet another distraction. I'm not very optimistic.
- nabakin 5y ago
  I think they have a revenue issue. They can't make the money necessary to sustain a lot of their work so they are trying to find other sources of revenue that are privacy focused to help. See the layoffs from last year for example.
- dralley 5y ago
  The problem is that half the commenters in any given thread about Mozilla say things like "they're too dependent on Google for revenue" and the other half say things like "they have too many side-projects, they should just focus on Firefox" and some select few complain about both simultaneously. Pocket, VPN, and Relay are all revenue generating and probably don't require that much effort to run.
5y ago

MickyTheMouse 5y ago

You can create aliases on Gmail with "+". firstname.lastname+spam@gmail.com. Probably works with other email providers too.

gostsamo 5y ago
This is a standard and every semi-smart spammer can strip the "\+.+" part so it works only with legit websites that you want to handle in a special way.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Fastmail has subdomain addressing [0] to solve that. whateveryoulike@username.domain.tld is the same as username+whateveryoulike@domain.tld [0]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plus-addressing-and-subdomain-addressing https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    So, spammers will learn to look at the "domain.tld" at one moment if this gets popular.
    - quiet_cool 5y ago
      another options is to buy a domain with a cpanel and set up a forwarder and filter to a specific folder in your secret main email account. The extra benefit here, since you own the domain, is that you can create a send identity of your arbitraryforwardingaddress@yourdomain.tld
extra88 5y ago
Yes, that is standard subaddressing but not all email providers support it (I've never heard of a Microsoft Exchange server supporting it). One problem with it is it exposes your real email address. Another problem, as the Wikipedia article notes, is there are a lot of inputs with poorly written validation that won't accept '+' as a valid email address character (they often only allow a-z, '.', and '@'). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing

batch12 5y ago

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.

lovestory 5y ago

So is this like craigslist email censor?

the_duke 5y ago

I've been using this pattern for years. 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" Combined with a password manager (Bitwarden) this is absolutely brilliant. * 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. * 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. * 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) * 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) * 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. A downside is the unique domain name. I always wanted a shared domain with lots of users to further reduce exposure. 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. 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. Highly recommended!

ryanjshaw 5y ago
Word of advice for anybody doing this: make sure you have a way to SEND email using one of your aliased addresses - because one day you will find a critical service provider can't process your emailed attachments unless sent from your registered email address (e.g. insurance claim document, bank documents, etc.)
- nathancahill 5y ago
  If it's handled by Google Workspace, it's easy to add additional "Send as" addresses.
- 5y ago

akdor1154 5y ago

Urgh, on one hand i love the idea and i think its a good business venture for mozilla. 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.

opencl 5y ago
You only get the bubbles if you install the extension.
groovecoder 5y ago
Howdy. I'm an engineer on both Facebook Container and Relay. We fixed the original bug in Facebook Container that was showing the prompt on every website - now it only shows the prompt on websites where Facebook trackers are detected. Facebook Container is something that inspired and influenced the development of Relay in the first place. Facebook Container users reported that they used websites and still saw ads from those websites in their Facebook feed, even though they were using Facebook Container. Because Facebook lets anyone create custom audiences for re-targeting, we need to give users a way to protect themselves from "back end" data sharing & tracking. (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/744354708981227?id=2469097953376494 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/744354708981227?id=24...)

duquedeturing 5y ago

Country limited...sight: "⁨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. " (https://relay.firefox.com/faq https://relay.firefox.com/faq)

Vinnl 5y ago
(Relay engineer here.) Note that that's for the Premium service - the free tier is available in most countries. We're hoping to expand to more countries in the future.
cuonic 5y ago
Tried signing up for Relay Premium (from France), Stripe is telling me that "The currency of this subscription isn't valid for the country associated with your payment"...
- toeknee0 5y ago
  Hi! I'm the Product Manager on Relay. I'm sorry about this! We've deployed a fix this morning. Let us know if you're still having this issue and we can help troubleshoot it further.
  - ghosters 5y ago
    I'm having same issues with PayPal as option, coming from Finland Edit: looking FAQ it appears it's not even available in Finland, I'm active user of relay and i saw the upgrade option, not reading the FAQ at all.

endisneigh 5y ago

simplest thing is to create a gmail, which will never be blocked. then forward certain types of emails to your regular email.

funOtter 5y ago

See competitors like https://simplelogin.io/ https://simplelogin.io/

encryptluks2 5y ago
Some notable differences: * SimpleLogin can be self-hosted and is open source * Has an open source app available in the F-Droid open source app store
oftenwrong 5y ago
also https://anonaddy.com/ https://anonaddy.com/
vxNsr 5y ago
Also https://www.33mail.com/ https://www.33mail.com/

j1elo 5y ago

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. 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. [1]: https://forums.linuxmint.com/ https://forums.linuxmint.com/ After a couple emails with the admin, they told me this: > The forum tried sending you the activation email but it'd rejected by the Firefox relay with this message: <...@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) > This is a known issue of the Firefox relay: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757 https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757. I'll check but I think TLS is not under our control, same as in the linked issue. > For now I think you'll have to use a different email address. So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses...

groovecoder 5y ago
(Tech lead of Relay here) Thanks for the detail! We'll look into this. We definitely want to maximize deliverability.
- j1elo 5y ago
  Thank you very much! Just to make it clear, I still use Relay for those sites that allow me to use it, I just wouldn't recommend it to friends because this kind of hiccups mean that it's not something that one can rely on with blind eyes. Glad to see there is active interest in ironing them out.
- hokonch 5y ago
  I'm glad to hear it! It's been almost a year since I reported this bug, and I still run into web-compat issues everywhere.
  - groovecoder 5y ago
    Thanks for reporting it! Nothing like an influx of new users (and now premium customers!) to re-light some fire under a bug! We'll work on it.

newhotelowner 5y ago

I created a subdomain, and create email on fly based on the domain name example ycombinator@subdomain.com I use https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/ to forward all subdomain email to my main email (gmail) account. It has a option to forward emails to a black hole too. From that I have learned that big companies like adobe & lendingtree gets hacked too. Or they sell your data.

newscracker 5y ago

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). 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. 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). 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.

toeknee0 5y ago
Hi! Product Manager on Relay here. Thank you for the feedback. We're actively working on upping the attachment limit as we know that is a major pain point. I hope that's something we can deliver to you shortly. Please keep the great feedback coming :)

EMM_386 5y ago

This sounds interesting, and I'd pay for it, but it seems to be dependent on a Firefox extension. Sadly, after literally 20+ years of using Firefox, I recently switched to Brave. The performance of FF was wearing on me. 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.

notRobot 5y ago
Not dependent on extension: https://relay.firefox.com/ https://relay.firefox.com/
Vinnl 5y ago
(Relay engineer here.) While we provide a Firefox extension with which generating an alias is just a click away, you're not dependent on Firefox specifically: you can generate and access your generated alias through the web interface at https://relay.firefox.com https://relay.firefox.com in any browser. (Also, I'm sure you've already tried a lot of things, but in case you didn't: perhaps refreshing Firefox helps? See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a....)

markstos 5y ago

Solving privacy by sharing all your emails [were obscuring your email address matters] with Mozilla.

nagyf 5y ago

What happens when the service is discontinued, and suddenly I won't receive any emails from potentially hundreds of accounts? Seems like a really bad idea to rely on this service.

Barrin92 5y ago
the primary use case for me is to generate throwaway registration emails, I wouldn't necessarily use this for anything you really depend on.

havkd 5y ago

Why not just create a burner Gmail address?

vxNsr 5y ago
how does that work? Then you need to still sift through all the spam you get... this allows you to prevent the spam from ever arriving.

encryptluks2 5y ago

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.

c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago
My issue with SimpleLogin is that they mutate the emails forwarded to your inbox in a manner that breaks features based on the sender. If you're using gmail's email grouping feature it gets thrown off by this. I am not sure how I would go about it, but I would guess that spam detection would become somewhat (more) difficult too.

one_off_comment 5y ago

I like this idea a lot, but I don't trust it to stick around. Mozilla is going to pull a Google and this will be a very painful thing to undo.

rpxio 5y ago

I've been using Spamgourmet for over a decade for this functionality. I'm surprised it's not more popular here. https://spamgourmet.com https://spamgourmet.com

vxNsr 5y ago
Never heard of this one. I'd love to get something like this that I can self-host, or pay to use my own domain.
yborg 5y ago
I think I've been using it for nearly 15 years. And I selfishly hope it never gets more popular since it's so obscure that it seems to fly under the radar of most blacklists despite its 20+ year history. I like how it keeps a count of all of the messages it's blackholed to a given address so you can see who pimped you like a used car if you use a unique address per signup.

unicornporn 5y ago

What the f. Do they even want users. I can not 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.

abraham 5y ago
If it's asking for a password then you do have an account. Try triggering a password reset.

drdaeman 5y ago

> Your own email domain youremail@yourdomain.mozmail.com 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. 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.

groovecoder 5y ago
Howdy, relay engineer here. The random aliases at mozmail.com are certainly the most private option. The subdomain aliases are for convenience so you can make up any alias you want even if you don't have a device on you. (e.g., checking into a hotel, etc.) As you say - there's always trade-offs involved.
- drdaeman 5y ago
  Aah, so the personal subdomains are catch-all accounts? So one doesn't have to talk to the Relay services at all and can just give out whatevertheycanthinkof@yourname.mozmail.com and it would get forwarded? If so - thank you, yes, now I see the point. My bad and please consider telling marketing team to highlight this hotel use case more prominently, because without it just comparing @mozmail.com vs @foo.mozmail.com is not really compelling and could be even confusing.

AbuAssar 5y ago

Mozilla, I want to give you money and subscribe, Yet you refuse with this ambiguit error: The currency of this subscription is not valid for the country associated with your payment. Try again

ranguna 5y ago
PM of relay posted a few comments up that they had delivered a fix 2h ago. Try again, it might work this time.
- toeknee0 5y ago
  Thanks for "relaying" the comment! :) Just to clarify my earlier comment, you should be able to subscribe to premium if you're in the following countries with payment details that match the country: United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Ireland. For users outside these countries, we know that it's not as clear in the experience that premium isn't available yet, and we'll be making updates very shortly to make this more clear. Additionally, we'll continue to try and grow the list of countries that Relay is available in, so please give us your feedback to help us prioritize expansion. Also, the free experience is available globally, if you're not able to subscribe to Premium yet, but still want to use Relay.

stereoradonc 5y ago

Fastmail provides multiple aliases (I have over 400+) and they never seem to have any problem.