All of us use email daily, the best thing to do to be protected is to use a good password and also two-factor authentication whenever possible, in addition, more advanced users tend to use several email accounts for different services . Firefox Relay is an easy-to-use solution that allows us to hide our real email , protecting it from spammers and cybercriminals, since we can give this address and cancel it whenever we want. Today in this article we are going to teach you everything about Firefox Relay, a service to hide our email and protect it.
What is Firefox Relay and what is it for?
Firefox Relay is a service that is currently in beta, and it is completely free. It consists of creating different email “aliases”, which will automatically forward all emails to our real email address. That is, Firefox Relay will create a “screen” email account that will receive all emails, and forward them to the real account, in this way, we will not have to use our real email account in the different Internet services.
One of the most interesting features is that we can eliminate this “alias” and even stop email forwarding easily and quickly. Another feature that we have today is that we can create a maximum of 5 aliases for each account of Firefox that we have registered in the service.
Currently Firefox Relay is in an experimental closed beta phase, but if we register, in a couple of days we will receive an email with an invitation to try it for free. You can access the official Firefox Relay website where you can log in with your Mozilla Firefox account, and request an invitation to the free service.
How to use Firefox Relay to hide my real email
When we register on the official Firefox Relay website and a couple of days have passed, we will receive an email indicating that we can now start using the Firefox Relay service, currently only available on Firefox for desktop (not for smartphones or tablets). In this email he explains that this service makes it very easy to create email aliases to hide our real email address, and therefore, protect our identity on the Internet. Another interesting feature is that we can keep track of the emails that are being forwarded, and even block or delete the email alias used.
When we click on “Get Firefox Relay” it will take us to the extensions store for the Mozilla Firefox browser, install the extension as usual, and then open it and click on “Continue” to log in with our real Mozilla Firefox credentials.
In the following menu you can click on “Login” with the email account that appears, we must remember that when requesting entry to the Firefox Relay beta, you must have entered the Mozilla Firefox account, because now is when we have need to log in for it to start working.
Create a new alias in Firefox Relay
To create a new alias in Firefox Relay, just click on the “+” icon in the upper right, we must remember that in this beta phase only 5 aliases are allowed.
When we have created it, it will appear just below, and we can give these aliases a name. We can also see the details such as the creation date, to which email address we are forwarding all received emails, and we can even deactivate “Forwarding” very easily, and also directly delete this alias.
Once we have created the alias, we can now start registering for different services with this created email.
Sign up for different services with the Firefox Relay alias and hide your real email
There are online services that are automatically detected by Firefox Relay, and it gives us the service icon, if we click on it, it will automatically give us the email address of the alias instead of our real email address. An example is the Amazon registry:
If we try to register in other services, it is likely that we will not get this icon, if it does not appear, we will have to enter the email alias manually. A clear example is the registration in the ADSLZone forums, we are going to create a new user with this Firefox Relay email.
We enter the new user registration section, we can quickly register using the Facebook or Google account or directly indicating username, password and also registration email.
In this record we have used the email account generated by Firefox Relay, as you can see at the top. In order to post, it is necessary to confirm the account with the email received by email.
If we look at our actual Gmail email inbox, we can see that we have received the email, it is really an email forwarded by the Firefox Relay service, as you can see at the top:
If we enter the control panel of aliases, we can see that an email has currently been forwarded, therefore, the service is working perfectly.
As you have seen, with this service that is currently free and allows us to create up to 5 aliases, we can protect our email by hiding it from the different services where we register, this is what is called “security by obscurity”.
We hope this tutorial will help you and hide your real email, as it is still your most important digital identity.
