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?

  • Atemu
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    1 year ago

    Emails received via SimpleLogin in Protonmail have the original From: in the headers though:

    From: Stack Overflow 
    To: stackoverflow.redacted@aleeas.com
    

    The setting you mentioned is only used for these headers:

    X-Pm-Original-From: "Stack Overflow - do-not-reply(a)stackoverflow.email" 
    Reply-To: "Stack Overflow - do-not-reply(a)stackoverflow.email" 
    

    which affects what it says in the subject line when you reply: