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It is impossible to do without an e-mail address and yet, despite years of technological progress, it is often just as difficult to live without one.
Most people still only have two e-mail addresses, one for work and one for private life, and they are often targeted by spammers, scammers and malicious e-mail senders in the digital equivalent of “we know where you live”.
Mozilla has announced that it is testing an experimental service called Firefox Private Relay that it believes will offer an attractive solution to this problem.
Installed as an extension, Private Relay will allow users to generate a random and temporary email address with one click, Mozilla said.
When a form requires your email address, click the “Relay” button to give an alias instead. We’ll forward emails from the alias to your real inbox.
Better yet, if this service suffers a data breach, the email address will not reveal anything – such as the user’s name or initials – about the user behind it. This could also make accountability more secure by turning the normally guessed email address into something truly random.
How to access the private relay
In order to use the product, a user of the Mozilla browser must request an invitation to the site. As the extension is still in the test phase, users can only use it after accepting the invitation.
Once the invitation has been approved, the Mozilla Firefox private relay will be accessible as a Firefox extension. The user simply needs to go to the add-on and generate an alias in place of the email address.
Once the process is complete, the user can then enter the alias for the email address with a single click. It is now easier to fill out online forms, register a new account, subscribe to the newsletter and send contact requests.
A Mozilla representative said that the browser manufacturer will forward emails sent to the alias to the user’s inbox. Thus, e-mails and suspected spam are not sent directly to the user’s address.
For spam and junk mail sent through the alias, Mozilla has a simple suggestion. The representative stated that users can simply disable or delete the messages altogether.
How does the “Private Relay” feature work?
- Go to the home page and add Firefox Private Relay to the browser.
- Log in to send an invitation.
- Generate an alias as a replacement.
- Click the “Relay” button when a form asks you to provide an email ID.
- Dispose of the account when its usefulness is served.