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mozilla
fx-private-relay
Python2020–2025
mozilla / fx-private-relay

fx-private-relay

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

11Distinct people
16Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

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

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year16 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-04-30 01:04:44 UTC to 2025-12-17 11:18:28 UTC.

024682020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

16 sources
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[0][1] and Relay looks kind of similar. When comparing Relay with the other two, I get the impression that SimpleLogin/AnonAddy actually interact with the community and understand that self-hosting is something people want to do and provide approachable 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. [2] Like, if a user signs up for Relay today and in 2 years Mozilla sunsets
Read the rest
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 complete and up to date and making the stack realistically approachable for outsiders. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30727935 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315816 [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay#optional-enable-...
In An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email
Relay is very cool but it took me like 24 hours since discovering and adopting it, to being unable to use it for an account. So I cannot recommend it to my family and friends who are much less tech literate than I am. In my case I was trying to create an account on the Linux Mint Forums [1]. The confirmation email never arrived, which was very confusing to me. [1]: https://forums.linuxmint.com/ After a couple emails with the admin, they told me this: > The forum tried sending you the activation email but it'd rejected by the Firefox relay with this message: <...@relay.firefox.com>: host inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com[54.240.252.212] said: 550 5.7.1 TLS required by recipient (in reply to RCPT TO command) > This is a known issue of the Firefox relay: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757. I'll che
Read the rest
ck but I think TLS is not under our control, same as in the linked issue. > For now I think you'll have to use a different email address. So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses...
In Firefox Relay

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