An Ode to Apples Hide My Email

• fx-private-relay

  178 1,415 9.9 Python

  Keep your email safe from hackers and trackers. Make an email alias with 1 click, and keep your address to yourself.

  

Any thoughts on improving the situation on self-hosting? I've written about the situation for Firefox Accounts (FXA, a dependency of Relay if you don't want to use third-party hosted services) here before and Relay looks kind of similar.

When comparing Relay with SimpleLogin, I get the impression that SimpleLogin actually interacts with the community and understands that self-hosting is something people want to do and provide documentation and support for that, whereas Firefox Relay seems built only with a single global prod deployment in mind and is more like "well theoretically you could but you're on your own and who would do that anyway?". Even if it's public and under an open license, the intended audience is Mozilla internal, e.g. [0]

Like, if a user signs up for Relay today and in 2 years Mozilla sunsets it, the way things looks today I think it wouldn't be viable even for most seasoned self-hosters to migrate to their own deployment.

I do appreciate the work you guys are doing and I think the engineers seem to have good intentions so don't want to be overly critical but mentioning it as open source alongside SimpleLogin and AnonAddy comes with some major caveats IMO, and I'd wish that some more priority is put on keeping docs up to date and making the stack approachable for outsiders.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay#optional-enable-...

• SimpleLogin

  525 4,654 9.0 Python

  The SimpleLogin back-end and web app (by simple-login)

  

I see SimpleLogin mentioned in the replies several times, but I haven't seen anyone mention that you can use your own domain name with them to prevent vendor lock-in.

You can also export your setup through their API so you can very easily migrate to a self-hosted instance if ever necessary.

And given the author talks about Have I Been Pwned, I feel I should mention that SimpleLogin has built-in HIBP integration (contributed by me in https://github.com/simple-login/app/pull/472)

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• AnonAddy

  288 2,994 7.6 PHP

  Anonymous email forwarding

  

For those who do not wish to interact with their webserver config (or can't) there is AnonAddy, which can be self-hosted (https://github.com/anonaddy/anonaddy) or paid for (https://anonaddy.com/). It's really convenient, with the added benefit (for the paid version) of having a domain, that is used by many people, which makes it easier to hide behind an email address.

• mailcatcher

  5 32 4.9 Go

  Self hosted mail trash service for raspberry pi (by 0xERR0R)

There are lots of ways to do this. Postfix is nice but a little heavy. The simplest and most functional way I've found is https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher since all it does is forward the emails. You can even use a throwaway gmail SMTP so it doesn't get send to spam

Easy to set up on a rpi/cheap VPS, as long as you have a hostname. And while you're there, look for a short domain name so it's fast to type (on credit card kiosks). You can get cheap short non-standard TLD's like .li. I got a 3 character domain for $5 a year, as short as bit.ly, but just for me

• ViMbAdmin

  1 482 0.0 JavaScript

  Virtual Mailbox Administration

  

I do the same thing, but instead of rolling my own UI, I use ViMbAdmin [1] (listening on my VPN). It's a great tool for managing aliases.

[1]: https://www.vimbadmin.net/

• mailpace-rails

  13 35 0.0 Ruby

  A plugin for ActionMailer to send emails via 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!

• burner-email-providers

  5 1,026 8.0 JavaScript

  A list of temporary email providers

For an example of that, see here: https://github.com/wesbos/burner-email-providers/pull/339

But yes, definitely a concern that is constantly on our radar.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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