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: "noreply@onlineshop.com [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?
Addy.io shows it as "Company ‘noreply at company.com’ "
So it is possible to more transparent. Of course when I click on it to show the actual email it shows something like “alias+noreply=company.com@mydomain.com” as that’s the relay mail which replies actually get sent to.
I was aware of SimpleLogin but I hadn’t heard of this service before, thanks for the tip! I’ll try to check them out and come back with a comparison.
They recently changed their name from AnonAddy which might be a reason you haven’t heard of them. I’ve been very happy with their service for a long time now.
I signed up for addy.io’s Lite plan since it supports multiple formats for the From header, and an option to move/disable the forwarding banner - exactly what I was looking for!