Hey there!
I’ve been eyeing email aliasing services like Firefox Relay or Proton’s Hide-my-email feature for a while, but I’m cheap!
Well, that and I tend to like doing things myself whenever possible.
So after a bit of investigating I found out that using Cloudflare and a custom domain name, you can essentially get infinite free email aliases that get redirected to an existing email address (Gmail in my case, but I’m working on moving over to Proton at the moment).
One thing lead to another, and I ended up coding a Firefox extension to automatically inject aliases into email input fields using a custom domain name.
Because I find this whole setup cool, and am fairly certain that other people could benefit from it, I wrote up a full guide on my blog. I’m no Cloudflare or DNS expert, so feel free to point out any mistakes or make suggestions here or in my post’s comments ;).
Note: Yes, I know that using a custom domain reduced the privacy benefits.
Relying on an oppressive walled-garden corp like Cloudflare who sees all traffic is an instant show-stopper for me. If CF is necessary to keep it gratis, then we have to wonder how Cloudfare is profitting. As you say:
“That, and Cloudflare is itself somewhat of a tracking and analytics company; so you’re never going to be really anonymous using this setup.”
I only read that far. But I have to say getting your own domain should be sufficient because some domain name services include gratis email forwarding. I don’t recall having a limit on the number of aliases but my memory could be off on that.
To be clear, in this case the Cloudflare reverse proxy shenanigans that let them snoop in on traffic are not actually in use (after digging into how it all works, I’m going to add to the warning I have about that specific bit); so as far as I can tell it’s mostly safe.
Could they change their rules and start snooping on emails they route at some point? Yes, and that’s indeed a risk with this sort of company.
But yeah, this is somewhat a compromise; I tried to make it as clear as possible =)
