I’ve been trying out Firefox Relay for a couple of months, and I really like the idea of hiding my real email address. The only thing putting me off from this concept is the fact that it makes my experience significantly worse, as it’s now harder to quickly understand where the email comes from.
A simple example: if I give my real email address to an online shop, I will receive a confirmation email with
From: Online Shop
Which is trivial to read.
If I give a generated Relay address, then the emails will come as
From: "[email protected] [via Relay]"
Which is much harder to parse off a quick glance, especially on smaller screens like a smartwatch.
When receiving emails, I don’t really care if they were forwarded via Relay, and I would much rather see the original sender in the From field. Is this necessary for proper privacy, or just an issue specific to Firefox Relay? And if so, is there any other email masking platform that supports what I’m looking for?
I HIGHLY recommend using custom domains and a email catch all instead of relay services.
Example Online Shop sends email to [email protected]
Now in your email client you can filter by the To: line for [email protected] and see everything
If you use a service like fastmail that supports dynamic from addresses, when you reply to one of this catch all emails your client’s from address will be set to the address you used.
Damn I wish Proton did that! I have to create and delete aliases on the fly on the rare occasion I need them.
But yes I love the custom domain catch all option. Stuff like adding prefixes to do filtering. bills, shopping, newsletters. Then allows easy and automatic filtering to folders.
Proton does offer this with simplelogin right? (Unless I misunderstand what you mean) I always sign up to stuff as [email protected] where the alias and domain are chosen once and then all adresses to that domain forward to your proton inbox.
Yeah it does. But I don’t use simple login.
+1 for fastmail. Been using it for over a year now with my custom domain, very happy. Synced with 1password so it can autogen masked emails.
Thanks for the recommendation! Unfortunately this approach doesn’t really work for me since my domain includes my real name, I’m also relying on email masking for some degree of anonymity.
Use Fastmail, and you can have masked email addresses that come in like regular email. You can look at the “To:” line to tell where the email was sent to, but the title remains the same.
You can always get a new domain with one of those monero domain resellers.
Email relay is more like bathroom door lock privacy, it prevents someone from trivially knowing your email, but your identity is discoverable (court order to relay service, ip logs, payment info).
If that fits your use case, great!
Custom domains and aliasing services have two slightly different purposes as aliasing services can serve to mask your identity aswell.
A custom domain still enables tracking across accounts.
It would require a human to do that linking. Nobody knows how many people have emails at your domain.
You could use a anonymous domain hosting service to register the domain as well.
Advancements in data science in the past 2 decades have shown the opposite.
The problem is not the paper trail between domain and you but the domain being a proxy for you, the person. Let’s take an example: You register the totally anonymous domain algk3oii01aslf0.com. Super duper secure and anonymous, right?
Now you use a catch-all to register your accounts using
servicename@algk3oii01aslf0.comon facebook, Google, M$, Reddit and what have you.Do you see the problem here? If those services were to collaborate (indirectly, they do on a certain level), that’d enable them to identify you as a single entity across these services. Your activity is tracked and attributed to a certain identifier. Whether that identifier is your real name or just a random UUID is of little relevance; it’s still you being tracked.
For the services I listed, this discussion is probably redundant as they have thousands of other means to fingerprinting you but you don’t have to make it easy for them either.