Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Mozilla Relay - Mask your email address (relay.firefox.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by MadBits@europe.pub to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm seeing lots of people subscribing with their real email address to different newsletters or random websites that they might use once in a while.

For a couple of years I have run a proxy SMTP that I kept to forward emails to my real address, as a privacy measure.

People tend to use the "+" sign in order to identify if their address was sold, for example signing up with "michael.john+amazon@gmail.com", now what most do not realize is the fact that when selling data to third parties, most companies parse their email lists and clear our those "+" sign. (Source: I have worked with companies that do that)

I found the relay from Mozilla to be massively useful in this case, so if anyone is interested, have a try with it:

https://relay.firefox.com/

As a side not: If you're using firefox, it integrates nicely into your browser, right clicking on a field and selecting "Use relay mask" is enough to generate an instant address so you can easily rotate them for each service.

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[–] MadBits@europe.pub 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Main issue for most users with the selfhosted version is that the ISP might be rotating IP addresses, most might have awful reputation or straight up blocking SMTP ports. I was lucky not to have any of those issues, but I have seen many such complaints. :(

But yea, self hosting is the way if possible, if not, a free services like mozilla's relay might be the best fit.

[–] LordOsslor@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

I've got a cheap VPS to act as a relay with a static, more or less trusted IP address. It just forwards incoming mail to my homelab, and outcoming mail to the recipient. The setup can get pretty complex if you haven't done this before.

Would probably be a lot easier to just deploy addy to a vps and call it a day

[–] dwt@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Email Schuld be self hosted on a vps or bar Metall server

[–] MadBits@europe.pub 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Again, if your internet provider doesn't do its best to prevent you from doing that, which most do.

[–] dwt@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Am I missing something? Hosting providers like hetzner should never do this?

That being said, email hosting can be difficult, for many reasons, so this is clearly not for everyone

[–] MadBits@europe.pub 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I meant self hosting as in hosting it yourself, at home, on your homelab, with your own network. Residential networks tend to block SMTP ports and IPs usually have horrendous reputation, most being blacklisted.

Hetzner, OVH and other hosting providers do not use residential networking. :)

[–] dwt@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

I seem to have misunderstood you there - for me self hosting includes doing that at a Hoster. It just means that you are the admin and am doing it yourself.