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.
I suppose if you don’t already have your own domain/email hosted on your own *nix box, and you use CF, then I guess this is a workable solution. A lot of geeks have just been doing this the old-fashioned way for decades… so seeing a different way to do it looks quite foreign (and a little bit of “why would you do this”) to me :p
To me the whole point of custom email+domain is to host it yourself and be free from vendor lock-in like this, but I suppose not everyone’s usecase is the same.
Yeah, self-hosting is almost always going to be the “ideal” solution for this sort of stuff, but not everyone has the means (knowledge, time, etc.) or even the reliable internet for that to make sense.
Personally, I know that a few years from now at most, I’ll have probably transitioned to something more custom, but I’m guessing this is going to be a more viable solution for a LOT of people.
