What's New with Firefox 142

I have found the majority of these relay services utterly useless. A large number of sites are using some kind of email verification service/API that detect all these relay/trash domains (mailinator etc.) and you can never sign up unless you have a legit domain. I'd be astonished if mozmail.com wasn't already on this list.

I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their primary domain as a relay meaning it's too risky to block all the legitimate addresses.

It's a risk, and it would be great if they worked on more sites, but "utterly useless" is too brash in my opinion - there are still a lot of sites that do accept them, and each one is one account fewer that can be linked to your others. I don't think I've had problems receiving concert or cinema tickets, for example - the one-time uses for which they are most beneficial. I just checked, and I currently have 385 email masks used. Certainly worth the €1 a month.

(Disclosure: I used to be on the Firefox Relay team.)

Have been using FireFox Relay for a couple of years now and can coun't the amount of sites which have denied my signup on a single hand.

How many fingers do you have - on that hand?

1583

It's an AI-generated hand, probably.

I'd say that's lucky. I'm using "Masked Email" on Fastmail with a personal domain and I still find that I get blocked from signups from time to time. I assume they're looking for some sort of pattern?

I have had the same experience. The vast majority of the time I use relay masks to sign up for stuff they work as expected. It is incredibly irritating when it does not work, but I blame the vendor and take that into account to decide whether I actually want to give this vendor a "real" email address. I often bail on these kinds of failed signups. Voting with my wallet.

In the alternative, you can configure Fastmail to allow sending and receiving to/from a wildcard address (which for sending allows you to specify the sending address at send time). In my experience this works far more reliably, and is one of the features that pushed me to move to Fastmail many years ago.