Email masks allow you to hide your email address on the Internet: every time you sign up for a mailing list, website, or app, you enter a disposable alias into the form instead of your real address. And soon you’ll be able to use a version directly from Firefox.
In good news for all Firefox users, Mozilla announced this week that Firefox Relay, its version of email masquerading, will be integrated into your browser. Released in 2020, Relay has so far only been accessible via a browser plugin. That separation has likely prevented masked email and its privacy benefits from becoming more popular, even though Mozilla offers all Relay users up to five email masks for free.
Most people don’t know that they can easily block email tracking and spam through Relay, let alone protect themselves in the wake of countless data breaches. Even with a single email mask in use, you can protect your real address, making a hacker’s attempts to take over that account much more difficult. And if you have unlimited skins and create a new one for every site and app, malicious actors can’t easily take information from data breaches and apply it widely across the web.
Mozilla
With upcoming browser integration, masquerading email should become much more convenient to try, and possibly a more common habit as well. Before Firefox Relay and other services like DuckDuckGo Email Protection and SimpleLogin started appearing, you could create a homebrew version with email aliases, but you also had to manage the whole effort: buying your own domain, creating each alias, and tracking each one. . one, usually through a cumbersome and basic web interface. Creating unique addresses for every site and service on the Internet was generally a time consuming task and not many people got that far. Easier access and increased awareness should help everyone maintain better privacy and therefore security on the Internet.
If you’re interested in seeing email skins in action, you can sign up for Firefox Relay now. If not, you can read more about email masks in our manual while you wait for the integration to start. Mozilla says that Relay will be available to all Firefox users directly in the browser later this year.
