mailpace-rails VS fx-private-relay

I run a small transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), our IPs are very rarely added to blocklists- but we are very strict on what we allow through our service, and surprisingly we’ve had no long term delivery issues with any of the big providers.

So thanks to the federated/decentralized design of email, is totally possible to be part of the network without any special privileges.

We are sending millions of emails every day though, which is quite different to sending a couple hundred personal emails a week. If you’re running this on a cloud host, expect to be blocked by default. However if you can find a small vps provider you’ll have better luck on sending yourself.

If you’re going to learn anything, email is a good bet. It’s barely changed in 30 years, and I suspect it will not change much for a long time.

I built my own transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), I wish I had found this link before I started.

I would also recommend reading the email RFCs, they’re not that difficult to understand and the history explains a lot. Email aside we can learn a lot from this kind of distributed, decentralised system design in the future.

Their website at https://mailpace.com/ says that it's only intended for transactional mails however

Give MailPace a try [0]. The creator seems like a great guy, and the service does what it says without any bs. I've been using it for a while now for side projects, and can only recommmend it.

0: https://mailpace.com/

I agree that this is a challenge! If you want to use the hosted version, it's impossible to avoid the need for that trust. I'm working on making self-hosting easier for this reason.

Some other services (like Firefox Relay) will use AWS' Simple Email Service for everything. I opted to go for [MailPace](https://mailpace.com/), an independent, privacy-focused provider instead, which is an improvement but still not ideal. I believe that SimpleLogin lets you self-host your email, which is best from a privacy perspective, but I'm slightly concerned about the UX of having to think about email deliverability. Still experimenting with that!

You could use an SMTP relay service and not worry about deliverability while still self hosting your email. I don't self host email anyway but for other things I use https://mailpace.com/ - it's has probably the best pricing in the market and works very well. Emails are delivered very quickly.

When I was launching my new website, I was looking for an email provider. That's when I came across OhMySMTP, a simple and privacy-friendly transactional email service. My web framework of choice, Laravel, unfortunately doesn't support OhMySMTP by default. Luckily, OhMySMTP does provide a swiftmailer transport plugin! This can be installed in any Laravel project, and can be configured like official transports.

Other services like this one: addy.io or relay.firefox.com (no pgp, as I remember)

That isn't alarmist, but almost all privacy features in Brave are already in Firefox as well. Looking at this page:

- Chromium customizations: Not necessary in Firefox

- Client-side encryption for Brave Sync: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-...

- DeAMPing: I think AMP has been dead for a few years now

- Limiting network server calls: I think this is a bit tangential to privacy, limiting calls is generally good but it doesn't mean you're transmitting less information. Brave's post comparing different browsers' first startup network calls is from 2019, not sure how Firefox performs today.

- Query parameter filtering: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/a...

- Better partitioning for better privacy: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/State_P...

- Referrer policy improvements: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/22/firefox-87-trim...

- Fine grained / temporary permissions API: This is nice, I don't think Firefox has this.

- Social media blocking: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

- Bounce tracking protections: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/08/04/firefox-79-incl...

- Limiting the life of Javascript: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-rolls-o.... Not explicitly mentioned but I believe Firefox does have this 7 day limit as well, in addition to other protections.

- Private windows with Tor: Firefox doesn't have built-in Tor integration, but the actual Tor Browser is built from Firefox.

I think Firefox also has one or two features that Brave does not, like Multi-Account Containers, and some paid services like https://relay.firefox.com/.

> In a sense, it sounds like the advice of the services is less subscribing to them than trying not to have a few e-mails that map to your personal identity.

Firefox Relay is a great way to do that :) https://relay.firefox.com

Integrating that with Monitor is pretty high on at least my personal wish list.

In case you're interested, Firefox Relay uses that stack and is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/

> In what ways has mozilla meaningfully dared to try and expand their revenue streams?

I think that Mozilla VPN is pretty nice. It's based on Mullvad VPN, so they seem to know their audience (given that Mullvad has a pretty okay reputation among many tech savvy or privacy conscious folks, a lot of which probably use something like Firefox as well): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

I guess there's also Firefox Relay, for those who might benefit from something like that: https://relay.firefox.com/

Not many other products to give them money for come to mind, though.

I've been dragging around a similar concern. My solution might be to use Mozilla's Relay for the email and Privacy.com for the credit card.

https://relay.firefox.com/

https://privacy.com/

That won't stop the data collection but it should mitigate how useful it is. Maybe?

Firefox Relay offers "randomized" phone numbers along with its emails: https://relay.firefox.com