Firefox’s Private Relay service tests anonymous email alias feature

Email addresses are impossible to live without and yet, despite years of technological advance, can often be just as tricky to live with.

Most people often still have only two email addresses, one for work and a personal address, and they are often sitting targets for spammers, scammers and nuisance emailers in the digital equivalent of ‘we know where you live’.

At the weekend Mozilla announced that it is testing an experimental service called Firefox Private Relay that it thinks will offer an appealing solution to this issue.

Installing as an extension, Private Relay will let users generate a random, temporary email addresses at the click of a button, explains Mozilla:

When a form requires your email address, click the relay button to give an alias instead. We will forward emails from the alias to your real inbox.

From the point of view of both the user and the service being subscribed to, this email address will work like any other except that:

When you’re done with that service, you can disable or destroy the email address so you’ll never receive any more emails from it.

Better still, should that service suffer a data breach, the email address will reveal nothing – for example the user’s name or initials – about the user behind it. It might also make accounts more secure by turning the normally guessable email address into something genuinely random.