Firefox Relay update brings larger attachment sizes and a filter for promotional emails

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 12, 2022
Firefox
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9

Firefox Relay by Mozilla is an email forwarding service that is designed to improve user privacy and reduce the amount of spam users get. Mozilla published an update in March 2022 that raises the attachment size limit and introduces a filter for promotional content to the service.

Launched in August 20202, Firefox Relay was introduced as a free service available on a website and as a Firefox extension. Users who signed up for it with a Firefox account could set up email forwards for existing email addresses using aliases provided by the service. Emails would go through the Firefox Relay service, which meant that senders would communicate with the Firefox Relay alias address and not the user's "real" email address.

Mozilla launched Firefox Relay Premium in November 2021. The subscription-based services unlocked several restrictions of the free plan, including the ability to reply to forwarded emails, use custom email domains, and use unlimited aliases instead of the 5 that the free plan offered.

The March 2022 Firefox Relay update improves the service in key areas. One of the big improvement increases the supported attachment size for all plans to 10 Megabytes. The previous limit of 150 Kilobytes blocked larger attachments from reaching the user's inbox. 10 Megabytes is still less than the usual 20-25 attachment size limits of email services.

Another new feature introduced in the update is the ability to filter promotional emails. Premium Firefox Relay users may block some or all promotional messages from a site now. The new filter options complements the "none" and "all" options that Firefox Relay supports. Mozilla notes that the blocking may not be 100% accurate, as non-promotional emails may be blocked by the service. The organization recommends that important senders are not blocked using the functionality, as blocked emails can't be recovered. An option to recover blocked emails would probably have been a better option.

Last but not least, Firefox Relay is now also available as a browser extension for Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. The extension for the service improves its usability. Users may add Firefox Relay aliases quickly to sign-up forms and other email forms to use it without having to copy and paste addresses manually.

Closing words

The March 2022 improvements are beneficial to free and premium users. Free users benefit from the increased attachment size limit, premium users get an option to block promotional emails on top of that.

The service has a long way to go functionality-wise, especially when compared to established services such as Simple Login.

Now you: do you use email forwarding services?

Summary
Article Name
Firefox Relay update brings larger attachment sizes and a filter for promotional emails
Description
The latest version of the email forwarding service Firefox Relay supports larger attachment sizes and the optional blocking of promotional messages.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Simland said on March 13, 2022 at 4:10 pm
    Reply

    They need to focus on the main browser; Firefox built in password manager for Android is not working right now, and I an switching to another one.

  2. Rad said on March 13, 2022 at 3:58 pm
    Reply

    Firefox need to focus on THE MAIN BROWSER, the password manager in Firefox for Android is buggy and stops working with NO FIX at all.

    1. Yash said on March 14, 2022 at 9:03 am
      Reply

      I’m a Firefox user and please don’t use any browser password manager. Use dedicated ones.

  3. beemeup5 said on March 13, 2022 at 5:00 am
    Reply

    Yahoo Mail allows you to make aliases which does the same thing, but probably even better because the regular Yahoo domain is used for the aliases as well, which means it will work even with sites which block “temp email” services. It would be trivial to make a filter which denies any email domain with the word ‘relay’ in it for example.

    I also pay for 33Mail Premium for forwarding certain email categories to my primary Gmail account. It’s been working great for many years now. 33Mail also allows you to set your own custom domain which I find very handy (premium only).

    Both Yahoo Mail aliases and 33Mail Premium not only allows you to receive mail but also REPLY to mail through the alias as well! Most temp / disposable email forwarding services only work in one direction. Firefox Relay allows replying through aliases but that is a premium feature. There’s also no option for setting your own custom domain, i.e. all aliases end in “mozmail”.

    I also have a few alternate Gmail accounts which I use as aliases for the few cases where other services have issues (very picky sites). I’m glad I made these accounts back when Gmail didn’t require a phone number to make an account. So many services today want to track you by your phone number it’s outrageous. And always insisting on insecure SMS too! Seriously SMS should be retired from 2FA in favor of TOTP options like Aegis or Authy. But that won’t happen because companies are addicted to tracking identities by phone numbers.

    1. Anonymous said on March 15, 2022 at 12:53 am
      Reply

      Didn’t Yahoo stopped the email alias service? It was good free service to relay emails but one day it started to broke and never receive any emails again so I stopped using it.

      Yeah you need phone number to sign anything nowadays, they need the number to sell the info not for security.

      1. beemeup5 said on March 15, 2022 at 11:21 am
        Reply

        My Yahoo Mail account is 18 years old and I still regularly receive incoming mail through my aliases.
        To add or remove aliases you need to go to ‘Settings’ > ‘More settings’ > ‘Mailboxes’.
        Yahoo allows you to make up to 500 aliases (disposable email addresses):
        https://i.imgur.com/7OhaQqS.png

        Note: The setting is only accessible through the new Yahoo Mail interface. You can’t add or modify aliases using the ‘Basic mail’ interface. If you prefer the Basic mail UI, then you can temporarily switch to the new UI to add or change an alias, then switch back to the Basic UI.

  4. Clairvaux said on March 12, 2022 at 7:46 pm
    Reply

    The paid service is only available in a few countries : United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Ireland.

  5. Neutrino said on March 12, 2022 at 5:09 pm
    Reply

    Typo: “Launched in August 20202”

    Is anyone using this?

    1. Neutrono said on March 12, 2022 at 6:44 pm
      Reply

      Yes? the fact that they improved it means that there is demand.

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