Firefox Relay

Firefox Relay lets you create email aliases and bypass website registration with your real information, as well as get content forwarded to you, or delete it before it even reaches your inbox. As a result, this enhances the user safety and helps people ignore unwanted spam.

Indeed, more and more services require your data. However, by giving information such as email, real name, and other details about yourself, you can soon become part of a statistic. The major problem with this is when information about people is being used to feed algorithms and/or tools that are later used to target you based on your interests (e.g. for selling you products).

And worst-case scenario, due to improper data management and a lack of adequate security measures/poor practices, those you trusted with your private data could sell it or expose it by mistake. Which later exposes you to more than just annoying ads and mail spam.

Firefox Relay comes in handy because it allows the creation of randomly generated email addresses. These are aliases that redirect all the content to your real inbox (or not, if you choose to disable the forwarding feature).

With Firefox Relay, you can enable it to display the small icon in each email filed, from any website. This is a great way of remembering to generate a new alias or to open up your Relay dashboard and to look for an existing one.

Moreover, you can name your aliases and use them for specific purposes (e.g. for shopping, for news websites, for social media, etc.). Even better, for non-important websites, you can disable the forwarding process and you won't be receiving any emails from that website.

Upfront, you should know that the limitations of this utility are: the maximum number of aliases you can create is 5 and, when having used an alias, the extension can't forward emails larger than 150KB to your inbox (e.g.emails with images). The latter, however, can also be an advantage. Sometimes senders embed email trackers for checking click-through rates (if you clicked on an advertisement/URL/image placed in the email, or not). In other cases, malicious code can be hidden in attachments. Either way, it is up to you to choose when you want to use your real email address or an alias.