The Best Firefox Relay Alternative for 2026

A Firefox Relay alternative is what most users start shopping for the moment they outgrow Mozilla’s five-mask free tier, hit the @mozmail.com domain limit, or want richer per-sender intelligence on what each alias is doing. Firefox Relay is a clean, Mozilla-backed mask service — but its feature set is intentionally narrow, and that narrowness is the reason searches like “Firefox Relay alternative” cluster around custom domains, leak attribution, deliverability, and price-per-feature. This guide compares the strongest alternatives in 2026, with honest notes on what each one does better than Relay and where Relay still wins.

What is Firefox Relay?

Firefox Relay is Mozilla’s email-mask service. You generate a random address that ends in @mozmail.com, hand it out instead of your real address, and Mozilla’s servers forward inbound messages to the real inbox sitting behind it. If a mask starts getting spam or sells your data to a third party, you disable it and the leak stops at Mozilla’s edge — the real inbox never sees another message from that source. Mozilla launched the product in 2020 alongside its broader privacy push, and it ships in three tiers documented on Mozilla’s official Relay page: a free tier capped at five masks, a paid tier at roughly $0.99/month for unlimited masks plus a custom subdomain on @mozmail.com, and a higher-priced Email + Phone bundle that adds a US phone-number proxy.

The architecture is the same forwarding pattern every alias service uses — incoming SMTP terminates at the provider, gets rewritten with a new envelope, and gets re-sent to your destination address. We covered the mechanics in detail in our explainer on how email aliases work under the hood, and it applies to Firefox Relay and to every option on this page. The differences between providers are not the forwarding primitive — they’re what each one does on top of it: custom domains, leak attribution, deliverability tuning, send-from support, and the export story when you eventually want to leave.

Firefox Relay’s deliberate narrowness is part of what makes it appealing. It’s a focused product run by a non-profit-adjacent organization with a long track record on user privacy. The Firefox Relay alternative search exists because that same narrowness leaves serious gaps the moment you go beyond casual sign-up masking.

Why people look for a Firefox Relay alternative

The reasons users start looking for a Firefox Relay alternative cluster into six buckets, ordered roughly by how often they show up in real Reddit, Hacker News, and Mozilla Connect threads in 2026:

• No real custom domain. Firefox Relay’s paid tier gives you a subdomain on @mozmail.com — not @yourname.com. That means every mask still carries the Mozilla brand, every recipient sees it, and the addresses are not portable to a different provider later. For anyone serious about long-term privacy, a real custom domain you own is the only address shape that survives provider changes — the rationale is laid out in our email alias portability guide.
• No leak attribution. Firefox Relay forwards mail but doesn’t tell you which sender domains are misbehaving on a given mask. When a mask starts getting spam, you can disable it, but you don’t get a per-sender risk score, a first-seen flag, or a weekly digest of which masks are being abused. Users who came to alias services specifically for breach attribution often outgrow Relay in the first month.
• Five-mask free tier. Five masks is enough for a casual user. It’s nowhere near enough for a developer signing up for SaaS trials, an investor with a dozen brokerage accounts, or a household running aliases per service. The free-tier ceiling drives most paid-tier upgrade searches into “is Premium worth $0.99/month, or should I switch?”.
• Mozilla product-roadmap uncertainty. Mozilla has a history of starting and stopping consumer products — Pocket changes, Mozilla VPN shifts, Mozilla Hubs sunset, the Manifest V3 saga. None of that means Firefox Relay is going anywhere imminently, but users who run aliases on long-tail financial and government accounts plan for ten-year continuity. A dedicated alias-first vendor with a clean export story is a lower-risk home for those addresses.
• Limited reply / send-from support. Replies work on Relay, but composing a fresh outbound message from a mask is more constrained than on dedicated services like SimpleLogin or EmailAlias.io. If you regularly need to start a conversation from an alias — a job-search address replying to a recruiter, a freelancer contacting a new client — the limitation matters.
• No API or catch-all. Power users want programmatic alias creation (so password-manager integrations can spin up a mask per signup) and a catch-all on a custom domain (so any address at your domain auto-creates an alias on first inbound). Firefox Relay ships neither. Both are first-class features on most of the alternatives below.

None of these are reasons Firefox Relay is a bad product. They are the reasons people who started on Relay actively go shopping for a switch once their usage gets serious. The rest of this guide is built around fixing those specific gaps.

How we evaluated each Firefox Relay alternative

Each option below was scored against the gaps a Relay user actually leaves over — not generic “best email service” review checklists. The six criteria:

• Real custom domains. Can you bring @yourname.com and route every alias through it? A subdomain on the vendor’s brand doesn’t count.
• Per-alias leak attribution. Does the dashboard tell you which sender domains have hit each mask, with timestamps, so you can attribute a leak to a specific sign-up? Have I Been Pwned’s breach corpus shows the median real account now appears in seven or more breaches — attribution is what makes mask-per-service strategies worth the effort.
• Free-tier ceiling. Is the free tier generous enough to validate the service before paying? Five masks (Relay) is the floor; ten-plus signals confidence in the product.
• Send-from and reply. Can you both reply to and start messages from an alias? Reply-only support is fine for sign-up forms but breaks job-search and freelance workflows.
• Portability and export. Can you walk away with your alias list — and ideally keep the addresses working — if the vendor pivots? CSV, JSON, or a one-click DNS handover on a custom domain are the green flags.
• API and integrations. Is there a documented API for programmatic alias creation, and does it integrate cleanly with Bitwarden, 1Password, or your own scripts? Cloudflare’s primer on APIs is a fine refresher on why the integration surface matters for automation-heavy users.

The honest takeaway up front: no Firefox Relay alternative is “better at being Firefox Relay” — they’re better at the specific features Relay doesn’t ship. Which one is the right pick depends entirely on which gap is driving your search.

Firefox Relay alternatives compared

The matrix below covers the six options most often shortlisted in 2026. Pricing is the entry paid tier; free tiers exist for most options but vary widely in what’s actually included.

The seventh row is Firefox Relay itself, kept in the table as the reference baseline. Reading across the columns, the pattern is consistent — every paid Firefox Relay alternative trades a slightly higher price for real custom domains, more capable attribution, and an API surface. The next six sections walk through each option individually, with pricing, features, and the honest pros/cons of each.

1. EmailAlias.io — best Firefox Relay alternative overall

EmailAlias.io is the closest like-for-like upgrade path for a Firefox Relay user who’s outgrown the five-mask cap and wants real custom domains. The free tier covers ten aliases (double Relay’s), and the Premium tier at $4/month adds unlimited aliases (marketed; soft cap 150), up to five real custom domains you fully own, send-from and reply, an API for programmatic alias creation, and a built-in exposure dashboard that flags which sender domains are hitting each alias and when. The exposure side is the structural difference — Firefox Relay shows you mail flowing through, EmailAlias.io tells you who is sending it and which masks are leaking.

Features

• Up to five real custom domains on Premium (not subdomains on a vendor brand)
• Per-alias exposure dashboard with sender-domain history and weekly digest
• Send-from and reply from any alias, with SPF/DKIM/DMARC inheritance from your custom domain
• REST API for programmatic alias creation, ideal for Bitwarden / 1Password username-generator integration
• Catch-all aliases on a custom domain — any address at your domain auto-creates an alias on first inbound mail
• CSV export of the full alias list with creation date, destination, and sender history

Pricing

• Free: 10 aliases, basic forwarding, weekly high-risk digest
• Premium: $4/month (unlimited aliases marketed, soft cap 150 + 20/day, 5 custom domains, full exposure analytics, API access)

Pros and cons

• Pros: Real custom domains, per-alias leak attribution, generous 10-alias free tier, send-from support, well-documented API.
• Cons: Higher monthly price than Firefox Relay ($4 vs $0.99), no native phone-number masking, closed-source.

2. SimpleLogin — best open-source Firefox Relay alternative

SimpleLogin is the open-source pick. The codebase is public, the API is well-documented, and the alias generation UX is among the cleanest in the category. SimpleLogin was acquired by Proton in 2022 and now powers Proton Pass’s hide-my-email feature, but the standalone product is still developed and remains a credible Firefox Relay alternative for users who want auditable code and real custom domains without buying into the broader Proton bundle.

Features

• Open-source server and clients (self-hostable for the technically inclined)
• Real custom domains with full SPF/DKIM/DMARC support on Premium
• Reply and send-from any alias
• Mature browser extensions and mobile apps
• JSON export of the alias list

Pricing

• Free: 10 aliases, basic forwarding
• Premium: $30/year (about $2.50/month) — unlimited aliases, custom domains, full API access

Pros and cons

• Pros: Open-source, custom domains, mature ecosystem, JSON export, lower paid-tier price than EmailAlias.io.
• Cons: Now Proton-owned (a concern for users who chose Relay specifically to avoid concentrating products at one vendor), no per-alias exposure analytics beyond the activity log.

3. addy.io — best budget Firefox Relay alternative

addy.io (formerly AnonAddy) is the budget-friendly open-source option. The free tier is unusually generous — 20 aliases and one custom domain, which puts it ahead of Relay’s free tier on both axes — and the paid tiers start at $1/month. The codebase is fully open-source, and the API is documented to the same standard as SimpleLogin. The main trade-off is feature depth: addy.io is laser-focused on alias generation and forwarding, with less polish on the analytics and dashboard sides than EmailAlias.io.

Features

• 20 aliases + 1 custom domain on the free tier
• Open-source server and clients
• Per-alias activity log (who’s sending, when)
• Multiple recipient addresses per alias
• CLI tooling for power users

Pricing

• Free: 20 aliases, 1 custom domain, reply only
• Lite: $1/month — adds send-from and additional limits
• Pro: $3/month — unlimited aliases and additional custom domains

Pros and cons

• Pros: Custom domain on the free tier (rare), open-source, lowest paid-tier price in the category, generous limits per dollar.
• Cons: No exposure analytics beyond the activity log, single-developer project (continuity risk to plan around), no API key on the free tier.

4. DuckDuckGo Email Protection — simplest Firefox Relay alternative

DuckDuckGo Email Protection is the lowest-friction Firefox Relay alternative — no paid tier, no quota, just a @duck.com address that forwards to whatever destination you set, with tracker-stripping applied to every forwarded message. It launched out of beta in 2022 and remains free. The trade-offs are real: no custom domains, no per-alias dashboard, no API, and you’re trusting DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy rather than running on your own domain. For casual sign-up masking, it’s a fair Firefox Relay alternative; for serious privacy hygiene, it’s a stepping stone to one of the paid options above.

Features

• Unlimited @duck.com aliases at no cost
• Tracker stripping inside forwarded messages
• Reply and send-from supported via the DuckDuckGo browser app
• Tight integration with the DuckDuckGo browser and Privacy Pro

Pricing

• Free, no paid upgrade path

Pros and cons

• Pros: Truly free, unlimited aliases, tracker stripping, simplest possible setup.
• Cons: No custom domains, no analytics, no API, vendor-controlled @duck.com addresses are not portable.

5. Apple Hide My Email — best Firefox Relay alternative for Apple users

Apple Hide My Email is the right pick for users who already pay for iCloud+ and live inside the Apple ecosystem. It’s integrated directly into Sign in with Apple, Mail, and Safari autofill — the path of least resistance for anyone who buys Apple’s bundle. The architectural caveat is the same as Firefox Relay’s: aliases live on Apple-controlled @icloud.com addresses, not your custom domain, so the addresses are not portable when you eventually want to leave. Apple’s iCloud+ documentation covers the feature in detail.

Features

• One-click alias generation inside Sign in with Apple, Safari, and Mail
• Custom domain support for paid iCloud+ subscribers (apex domain only)
• Reply and send-from from inside Apple Mail
• Bundled with iCloud storage, Private Relay, and other iCloud+ features

Pricing

• $0.99/month iCloud+ (50GB tier) — Hide My Email is included
• $2.99/month and up for larger iCloud+ tiers

Pros and cons

• Pros: Best-in-class system integration on Apple devices, cheap when bundled with iCloud+, mature and stable.
• Cons: Apple-only (no usable surface outside iOS / macOS), no analytics, Apple-account lock-in, no API.

6. Proton Pass hide-my-email — best Firefox Relay alternative bundled with a password manager

Proton Pass’s hide-my-email feature is the Firefox Relay alternative for users who want a bundled password manager and alias generator in one product. Proton acquired SimpleLogin in 2022 and uses it to power the alias side of Proton Pass, so under the hood you get SimpleLogin’s engine with Proton’s brand on top. If you’re already in the Proton ecosystem for Mail, VPN, or Drive, adding Pass for credentials and aliases is the cheapest path to alias coverage. If you specifically came to Firefox Relay because you wanted to avoid concentrating products at a single vendor, this isn’t the alternative for you — see our Proton Pass alternative roundup for why concentration risk drives most of those searches.

Features

• Hide-my-email aliases (SimpleLogin engine) bundled with the password manager
• Custom domains on Pass Plus and above
• Reply and send-from any alias
• Bundles cleanly with Proton Mail, VPN, and Drive on the Proton Unlimited plan

Pricing

• Free: 10 aliases on Proton Pass free
• Pass Plus: $1.99/month — unlimited aliases, custom domain, extras
• Proton Unlimited: $7.99/month — bundles Pass with Mail, VPN, Drive, and Calendar

Pros and cons

• Pros: One bill for credentials and aliases, SimpleLogin engine under the hood, mature Proton ecosystem.
• Cons: Couples your alias choice to a password-manager and bigger-bundle decision, single-vendor concentration risk, less suited if avoiding bundling was the original Firefox Relay choice.

Key features to look for in a Firefox Relay alternative

When stacking any of these options against the others, the five features that actually matter long-term — past month one of usage — are:

• Real custom domains. Without a domain you own, your aliases are tied to whichever vendor you chose this year. Switching providers later means recreating every alias on the new vendor’s brand domain — a one-by-one rebuild across every downstream service. With a custom domain, switching providers becomes a DNS MX-record edit and the addresses keep working.
• Per-alias sender analytics. The reason most users adopt aliases in the first place is to detect leaks. A dashboard that shows which sender domains have hit which mask, and flags first-time senders on otherwise quiet aliases, is what turns alias hygiene from passive forwarding into actionable signal. Without it, you’re masking but not monitoring.
• Send-from and reply. Reply-only support is enough for sign-up forms. The moment you need to initiate a conversation from an alias — answering a job listing from your job-search address, contacting a vendor from your business-only address — send-from becomes mandatory.
• API access. Programmatic alias creation lets your password manager (Bitwarden, 1Password) generate a fresh mask at every signup. Without an API, that workflow is manual copy-paste from a dashboard.
• Clean export. Whatever you pick today, plan the exit. CSV or JSON export of the alias list with destinations and creation dates is the minimum bar; a documented DNS handover on a custom domain is the gold standard.

The five features above are the gap between casual mask use and durable privacy hygiene. Every Firefox Relay alternative ranked above covers some of them; only a few cover all five.

How to migrate from Firefox Relay

Once you’ve picked a replacement, the migration itself is straightforward. The five-step sequence below handles the cutover cleanly, with a safety window so nothing breaks while you swap addresses across downstream services:

• Set up the new alias service with a custom domain. This is the single most important step — without a custom domain you’re swapping one vendor’s lock-in for another’s. The MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup is covered end-to-end in our email alias portability guide.
• List your active Firefox Relay masks. In Mozilla’s Relay dashboard, export or screenshot the list of active masks and note which downstream service each one is tied to. Don’t blindly recreate dead masks — this is a good cleanup moment.
• Recreate the masks you actively use on the new service. Create one alias per active downstream account on your new custom domain. Pick descriptive labels (bank-acme@yourdomain.com, not relay-h3n4j5@) so future you can scan the list.
• Update each downstream service to the new alias. Log in to each one and change the email of record. The pattern is identical to the bank, brokerage, and SaaS workflow from our bank account alias guide.
• Keep Firefox Relay active for 30 days. Old masks continue to forward during this window, so any service you missed in step 4 will surface naturally and you can update it as mail arrives. After 30 days of quiet, cancel Firefox Relay Premium and disable the remaining masks.

The whole migration usually takes about an hour of active work plus the 30-day overlap. The two failure modes to plan around: cancelling Relay before the overlap window completes (you’ll lose any in-flight password resets to old masks) and reusing the same mask label structure on the new provider (defeats the point of a clean cutover — pick a labelling convention you actually want long term).

Common use cases

The right pick depends as much on how you use aliases as on which features you want. The most common use cases and which alternative each one points to:

• SaaS sign-up masking — every signup gets its own alias so you can detect leaks. Best fit: EmailAlias.io for the analytics, addy.io if cost matters more than analytics depth.
• Job search with private inbox — recruiters get a job-only alias that you can rotate after the search ends. Best fit: any Firefox Relay alternative that supports send-from on a custom domain — EmailAlias.io, SimpleLogin, or addy.io Lite.
• Bank and brokerage aliases — long-lived financial accounts where ten-year continuity matters. Best fit: EmailAlias.io or SimpleLogin on a custom domain you own; never a vendor-brand domain.
• Newsletter inbox — high-volume newsletter sign-ups isolated from your main inbox. Best fit: DuckDuckGo Email Protection for casual, EmailAlias.io if you want to track which lists are misbehaving.
• Apple-only households — everyone’s already on iCloud+. Best fit: Apple Hide My Email for the system integration, with a paid EmailAlias.io seat for the household member who needs portability or analytics.
• Developers and API users — programmatic alias creation tied to password-manager integration. Best fit: EmailAlias.io or SimpleLogin Premium — both expose clean APIs and document the endpoints fully.

Final thoughts

The strongest Firefox Relay alternative for most users is whichever option closes the specific gap that drove the search in the first place. If the gap is the five-mask free tier, almost any of the six above will do. If the gap is custom domains, EmailAlias.io, SimpleLogin, and addy.io are the three credible picks — and EmailAlias.io is the only one that pairs them with a per-alias exposure dashboard out of the box. If the gap is product-roadmap uncertainty, the right move is to anchor your aliases on a custom domain you own so the next provider switch (whenever it comes) is a one-evening DNS edit instead of a months-long inbox rebuild.

Firefox Relay isn’t a bad starting point — it’s a clean Mozilla-backed mask service with a fair free tier and a low-priced Premium. The reason this guide exists is that “starting point” is exactly what it is. The features that turn aliases from a sign-up trick into durable privacy infrastructure — custom domains, leak attribution, send-from, API access, clean export — are not on the Relay roadmap. They are on every Firefox Relay alternative ranked above.

If EmailAlias.io looks like the right Firefox Relay alternative for your situation, the free tier is the lowest-friction way to validate the migration pattern. Start with the free 10-alias tier, walk through one end-to-end cutover on a low-stakes account, and scale the pattern across the rest of your inbox from there. The five-step migration above takes about an hour of active work — and once a custom domain is in the mix, every future provider change becomes cheap.

Frequently asked questions