Firefox Relay was added to the GitHub "temporary mailbox" project, causing a large number of user dissatisfaction

In November 2021, Mozilla launched a mail privacy relay service called "Firefox Relay" designed to help users protect their privacy and limit the amount of targeted spam.

The traditional "temporary mailbox" service will provide users with a temporary mailbox with a randomly generated mailbox name and a validity period of 10 minutes. During this period, users can use this mailbox to register some Internet accounts and receive verification codes. Its benefits, in addition to protecting privacy, also protect users from marketing advertisements​.

While bringing convenience to users, “temporary mailboxes” also bring “trouble” to service providers​, which will greatly reduce the effectiveness of marketing emails and allow criminals to abuse website-related services​.

Therefore, many service providers will verify whether the user's mailbox is a "temporary mailbox" when the user registers, and if so, they will directly reject the user's registration.

A project called "disposable-email-domains" on GitHub is a temporary mailbox list maintained by the community, which lists the mailbox formats used by various temporary mailbox services. Internet service providers can use or refer to this project to force users to register accounts with real email addresses.

Firefox Relay is similar to a traditional "temporary mailbox", but it is fundamentally different - it is an email address used for "relay", the temporary mailbox is associated with the user's real mailbox, and received Mail is "forwarded" to the user's real inbox. Therefore, the ISP will only know this randomly generated email address, but not the real address.

Firefox Relay is not a "temporary mailbox" that can be thrown away at any time, and it will not generate a new email address every time. It is associated with the real mailbox, and users can use Firefox Relay as the primary mailbox.

However, recently, the “disposable-email-domains” GitHub repository plans to add relay.firefox.com to this list and has submitted a corresponding PR, which has aroused strong dissatisfaction among users​. In addition, service providers such as 10minutemail, GuerrillaMail and Mailinator have also been added to the domain blacklist.

​GitHub project address:

https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email-domains/pull/298