Support BYO domain names to replace mozmail.com

[yo1dog]

Love the idea of Firefox Relay, but I don't want to permanently tie myself to mozmail.com.

• What if Firefox Relay is discontinued?
• What if mozmail.com becomes blacklisted as it nearly did?

If I could use one of my own domain names (e.g. {random}@yo1dogrelay.com), I avoid both issues. If Relay is discontinued I could update the MX records to point to a different relay service, or directly to an email service such as gmail. And the unique domain name avoids blacklists.

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Aside: While theoretically these risks could also apply to hotmail.com, outlook.com, icloud.com, etc., I feel mozmail.com is uniquely at risk because it is both relatively new and used only for a relay service. It does not have an extremely large set of "normal" inboxes behind it which makes the others nearly impervious to being shutdown or blacklisted.

[nilshoell]

I would love to see a feature like this, maybe in one of the new price tiers? That would certainly increase the number of applicable use cases for Relay. However, users should have the option to still use mozmail.com, as the custom domain can be easily used to link relay addresses to each other and ultimately to an individual using DNS information.

[rafalkrupinski]

Custom domains is a ~security~ privacy anti-feature.

I really don't get why Moz is putting that huge banner bugging me to set one up.

[sosnik]

I disagree that it is a security anti-feature. It may be a privacy one, in that the main point of alias domains is to 'hide within the crowd'. But it is not a security issue. Not accommodating custom domains is also a vendor-lockin issue. Say I use ff relay with 400+ websites, wouldn't it be a PITA if I suddenly had to move?

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 11:06 PM Raphael Krupinski @.***> wrote:

Custom domains is a security anti-feature.

I really don't get why Moz is putting that huge banner bugging me to set one up.

Message ID: @.***>

[rafalkrupinski]

You're right about it being privacy and not security issue. Bad wording on my side.

Relay is a privacy tool and you're asking for a privacy anti-feature.

Vendor lock-in is inherent to Internet services and email in particular, not Relay. If I was to address the issue of Mozilla potentially abandoning Relay, I'd prefer that the foundation would pledge to transfer the domain and accounts to another provider, had they decided to discontinue the service.

[sosnik]

Again, I respectfully disagree that vendor lockin is inherent to 'email in particular'. Email is one of the first truly federated systems on the internet: where services are expected to cooperate but remain independent. If you own your domain you can take your localpart to any provider — move from Google to Microsoft. You can change your server from Postfix to OpenSMTP to Exim to Sendmail and back again. Email is inherently free of vendor lock-in unless you make it that way.

Mozilla abandoning relay is not the only problem. For instance, the domain might get blacklisted. Your account might get banned. Your country might stop receiving service. There are many reasons why I do not feel remotely comfortable tying something as omnipresent and important as email to one provider.

Again, I agree on the privacy aspects of custom domains, but that is why it should be an option. Having a random email alias on a common domain is not the be-all end-all of privacy. For instance, your identity is often leaked through your payment details and shipping address. Or your real name (that you sometimes have to give). At that point, the benefits of a 'privacy' alias become moot. There are other uses besides privacy for email aliases. For example, spam management. I have been using + aliasing for that for over a decade.

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 11:38 PM Raphael Krupinski @.***> wrote:

You're right about it being privacy and not security issue. Bad wording on my side.

Relay is a privacy tool and you're asking for a privacy anti-feature.

Vendor lock-in is inherent to Internet services and email in particular, not Relay. If I was to address the issue of Mozilla potentially abandoning Relay, I'd prefer that the foundation would pledge to transfer the domain and accounts to another provider, had they decided to discontinue the service.

[rafalkrupinski]

By vendor lock-in I meant that once you commit to using a particular provider like gmail (and their domain), you're practically locked in, bc as you've said it, changing address at 400+ providers is PITA. But if you're seriously talking about maintaining you mail server, then moving email address shouldn't be a problem to you. Unlike maintaining a server, you only have to do it once (unless of course your accounts get banned...).

I guess my point is that I'd prefer the community focus on privacy features before it starts adding privacy anti-features.

Come to think about it, the idea of BYOD is better than the current custom domains $custom.mozmail.com, where you get less privacy AND dependency on the provider domain.

For example, spam management. I have been using + aliasing for that for over a decade.

I don't recall + aliases ever being effective against spam. And I suspect once enough people uses custom domains for email masking, they'll figure out a way around it too (small number of random email names per domain + mask provider IP => same target)

[yo1dog]

You don't have to run your own email server to avoid email vendor lock-in, you just have to use a custom domain. me@gmail.com is locked to gmail because gmail owns the domain. But you can easily switch me@mydomain.com from gmail to outlook by simply updating a few DNS records for mydomain.com. This is the reason for this request: mozmail.com is vendor locked, a custom domain is not.

FWIW, I use email aliasing for spam management more so than privacy. I used to use + aliasing but that was broken as it gained popularity in the last few years. Spammers have started just sending 2 emails to both the address with and without the + alias.

Yes, it is certainly possible to detect that a certain domain is used for an extremely small subset of email addresses and to assume that all emails with that domain are the same person. But practically, I doubt that the extremely tiny percent of users that use custom domains would warrant the level of effort to actually implement that matching. It should still buy us another 10 years, just as + aliasing did. Regardless, with the rising prevalence of anonymized email (Apple "Hide My Email"), I'd guess that sophisticated fingerprint heuristics would overshadow email linking way before then anyway, if it hasn't already.