Privacy

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Can email masking be "transparent"? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by scorchingheat@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 8 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I HIGHLY recommend using custom domains and a email catch all instead of relay services.

Example Online Shop sends email to OnlineShopName@email.mydomain.com

Now in your email client you can filter by the To: line for OnlineShopName@email.mydomain.com 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.

[–] scorchingheat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 1 year ago

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!

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