Firefox Relay update brings larger attachment sizes and a filter for promotional emails

Firefox Relay by Mozilla is an email forwarding service that is designed to improve user privacy and reduce the amount of spam users get. Mozilla published an update in March 2022 that raises the attachment size limit and introduces a filter for promotional content to the service.

Launched in August 20202, Firefox Relay was introduced as a free service available on a website and as a Firefox extension. Users who signed up for it with a Firefox account could set up email forwards for existing email addresses using aliases provided by the service. Emails would go through the Firefox Relay service, which meant that senders would communicate with the Firefox Relay alias address and not the user's "real" email address.

Mozilla launched Firefox Relay Premium in November 2021. The subscription-based services unlocked several restrictions of the free plan, including the ability to reply to forwarded emails, use custom email domains, and use unlimited aliases instead of the 5 that the free plan offered.

The March 2022 Firefox Relay update improves the service in key areas. One of the big improvement increases the supported attachment size for all plans to 10 Megabytes. The previous limit of 150 Kilobytes blocked larger attachments from reaching the user's inbox. 10 Megabytes is still less than the usual 20-25 attachment size limits of email services.

Another new feature introduced in the update is the ability to filter promotional emails. Premium Firefox Relay users may block some or all promotional messages from a site now. The new filter options complements the "none" and "all" options that Firefox Relay supports. Mozilla notes that the blocking may not be 100% accurate, as non-promotional emails may be blocked by the service. The organization recommends that important senders are not blocked using the functionality, as blocked emails can't be recovered. An option to recover blocked emails would probably have been a better option.

Last but not least, Firefox Relay is now also available as a browser extension for Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. The extension for the service improves its usability. Users may add Firefox Relay aliases quickly to sign-up forms and other email forms to use it without having to copy and paste addresses manually.

Closing words

The March 2022 improvements are beneficial to free and premium users. Free users benefit from the increased attachment size limit, premium users get an option to block promotional emails on top of that.

The service has a long way to go functionality-wise, especially when compared to established services such as Simple Login.

Now you: do you use email forwarding services?

Firefox Relay update brings larger attachment sizes and a filter for promotional emails