Firefox Relay Offers Unlimited Email Aliases as Part of its New Premium Plan (engadget.com) 55
Mozilla launched Firefox Relay as a free product that gives you five email aliases you can use every time you need to sign up for a random account online. From a report: Now, the organization has introduced a paid Premium tier for the service that will give you access to even more aliases. You'll get your own subdomain (yourdomain.mozmail.com) when you subscribe, and you'll be able to create an unlimited number of emails. The tier will also give you access to a summary dashboard with the emails you make, the option to use your aliases when you reply to messages and a 150 kb attachment allowance. After you sign up for Relay, you'll have to install its Firefox extension to be able to take advantage of its features. Every time you visit a website that asks for an email address, the Relay icon will appear on your browser, and you can click it to generate a random address.The service will forward messages you get using your aliases to your primary email account, and you can block all messages from coming in or even delete the alias when it starts getting spam. Mozilla didn't say how much a Premium subscription will cost in the future, but it's offering the tier at an introductory price of $1/EUR1 per month for a limited time.
Provoked OT tweet of the day? (Score:2)
Naw, not worth following the troll's lead, but why did you propagate the BS Subject?
Won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't work (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Won't work (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. The only way to make this sustainable is to have your own domain and have Firefox allow you to point an MX record for (eg) sub.mydomain.org at their MX servers. Lots and lots of different domains will make it impossible for sites to block them all.
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Although, of course, they could just do an MX lookup and block anything that resolves to Firefox's servers. So yeah. The only truly sustainable way is to run your own servers.
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The only truly sustainable way is to run your own servers.
It's what I do, and you'd be surprised how little spam ever arrives at those inboxes.
Most of the spam arrives at my 'proper' address, which I believe has been sniffed by viruses on other people's computers.
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I'm the opposite. While a lot of spam comes to my "well known" addresses, I get a ton more spam to random addresses I've never used. I've owned the domain since the beginning - it was never owned before. And yet I get tons of email to addresses I've never used, ever. Even more curiously, I get email to th
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No, the only way to make it sustainable is to hide the aliases among real addresses that people use normally. You know, the only reason you're not blocking all of Cloudflare isn't that they allow anyone to point their domains at them but that blocking Cloudflare would do huge collateral damage, because aside from all the crooks, Cloudflare also protects some legitimate sites that you use. And that doesn't work just for the Cloud: It's the modus operandi of the Cloud in general. You can't block Cloud provide
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Re:Won't work [even with money on it?] (Score:2)
I disagree with you because if the business model is actually viable, then they would have the resources to stop the abusive use of aliases.
However I also agree with you because I don't think the business model is viable.
There are two email features I want badly enough to (help) pay for, and this is NEITHER of them. Also, Gmail already provides unlimited aliases (with the plus option) and Outlook has multiple aliases.
(1) A spammer fighting tool. I want an email system that would let me donate some time to h
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It's called "confidential mode" in Gmail, but maybe the EVIL google is backing away from it? The option used to quite be intrusive, but I couldn't find it and had to check with the so-called Help system. When they first introduced it, I definitely remember sending feedback asking how to block it.
My only previous experience with confidential email may have been prejudicial. It was part of Notes Mail, though I've already forgotten the terminology used. There were several related features. That was actually a
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Just buy your own domain, if you are willing to pay, and its not that much, and you have absolute control over your email, and the domain will never be popular.
Also you are not relying on another company provide a service in order to keep your email.
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at which point I know I don't want them to have my email anyway :)
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That is right. I've blocked them too (used to work at a place that sent emails out). And the reason is the following: The person that enters such an email address does not want a long term stream of emails. Or anything. It basically makes the whole point of email "moot" (having an inbox).
Now, do I believe that businesses ask for email addresses illegally? Yes. You should not require to enter an address for e.g. a download. So we accepted Mailinator-type addresses but did not deliver (as it was too hard for
They're still making a profit at $1/mo (Score:2)
Even the introductory price has to exceed their costs for supplying this service. Sounds like an attempt to rake in some bucks.
Just buy your own domain and forward it... (Score:5, Informative)
You can buy your own domain for like $5 / year, and configure it at the registrar to forward all emails to somewhere else.
This lets you just make up "foobar@mydomain.com" emails on the fly, for any website you visit.
As a bonus - switch email providers whenever you damn well choose, do not be bound to "MozMail" going belly up 3 or 4 years down the road.
It is not technically complicated to set this up. I have used this system personally for two decades now, forwarding to either my own email server, or Yahoo, and then eventually GMail.
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Would you explain in more detail? If I want to set up say 50 email addresses for 50 separate companies I deal with would I need to setup 50 accounts someplace? How do I reply via a specific email address without having to log in to that addresses account?
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Most mail servers have a "catch all" account for everything that doesn't have a specific inbox.
You want an email address on the "bigcompany.com" web site?
Just type "bigcompany@yourdomain.com" and the confirmation mail will go to the catchall inbox. No configuration or setup needed and you can just forget about it afterwards.
If they ever sell your email address you'll get spam arriving at that address and know it was them.
Re:Just buy your own domain and forward it... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, catchall is nice. Up to the point where a spammer tries bruteforce all valid email addresses. I still recall when that happened to me. Spammer started from aaaa@mydomain.tld, several threads (bots) .By the time I became aware of it, I saw messages destined for xaaxa, xaaxb, etc.
Since then, I've never used catchall.
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I have worried about this but in the end you can just write a filter that removes anything that is not xxx.valid@domain.com, and if a spammer finds your real email address there is nothing stopping them from just spamming that, what it means is that it is a lot harder to find your actual email address that you care about, you can get spam either way.
It is also a security bonus, when you sign up to site if someone wants to hack your account not only do the need to guess your password, they also need to guess
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Yes, I use this technique now. Problem is I can't reply through each address without setting up a "real" mailbox the address. The outgoing/reply emails can only go through established accounts rather than the catchall addresses. Does your provider allow this? If so, who is it? (I use 1&1/ionos)
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I have several of my own domains. I have one real email account and a couple hundred aliases which forward to that one real email address. I have one alias for each entity (commercial or real person) I need to communicate with. I use Thunderbird for my email client, which lets me create multiple identities. Whenever I need to send out an email to a person, I select the identity that corresponds to that entity.
Thunderbird needs better entity selection (it's one big, unsearchable list) for new emails, but it
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I never want to interact in that way with any organization I am using this technique with. If I actually wanted to communicate with them bi-directionally, then I would give them my "real" myname@mydomain.com address, which is the configured reply-to address in GMail.
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My concern with that is that I don't see anything keeping mr. spammer from saying "oh, username+something@gmail, that's nice, I can just drop the +something or change it to something else and they won't know how I got their address"
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Spammers are bots. No one is manually going through 100 million email addresses to pick out the few people using aliases.
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I'm pretty sure they will make an exception for Google.
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Never use the undecorated address for anything, then if you see it show up you know that the sender is either misconfigured or malicious. Either case is reason to plonk.
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This trick used to work, but spammers know about it now and strip the + part.
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You can also set up the catch-all Joce suggests only on a subdomain. Imagine you own, say, saint.lv**, and the email you want to use with your "real" contacts is bethany@saint.lv...
With slightly more configuration, you can set up a catch-all for bethany.saint.lv and sign up with slashdot@bethany.saint.lv, mastodon@bethany.saint.lv etc. The cute thing with this is that other people in your family/business/organisational-unit can also have their own catch-all emails, too, and all you need is one extra MX reco
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>> If you have one that lets you type arbitrary text in the From box...
My "catchall" provider (1&1/ionos) will let me type in the information but won't let me send unless the from matches the account. I can use a Reply-To with anything but that leaves the true identity in the mail header.
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That domain will just get blocked (Score:2)
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There is a big distinction between an anonymous inbox and a throwaway inbox. We used to block Mailinator etc, but if it was just an anonymous forwarder, we would not.
Just think about how much money they could make (Score:3)
if they hadn't broken the GUI and axed off their future. Mozilla's unwillingness to accept what they are there for is one of the nails in the coffin of the web.
Mozilla isn't there to be just another "browser company" finding new ways to monetize their business. Mozilla has billions. They could just hire developers to completely re-implement the browser in a memory safe language. Then, if they asked for money, they'd probably even get donations.
if they hadn't broken the GUI (Score:2)
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The Menu is hidden by default, because they were trying to replicate Chrome. Then there are now ads. It has unwanted features like Pocket or that colour selection stuff. In short, their GUI was better 10 years ago.
There's a native way to do that (Score:1)
Sure, it's not foolproof. But when it's so low-effort on your part, there's no reason not to.
SimpleLogin.io (Score:2)
They have an open source project that does exactly this and you can pay them to use it as a service, if you want.
You can even bring your own domain. It also works in reverse, so you can reply safely to redirected emails.
They also have a browser extension and phone apps.