"It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere," according to The Verge. And it's powered by email platform Fastmail, perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999, Fastmail hast a long history in the email space (unlike Hey.com) and they seem to know what they're doing (look at their recent added support for BIMI). If you want to "hide my email" but don't want to do it via the Apple ecosystem, it sounds like this is really worth checking out.
Firefox Relay is another service with a similar aim, perhaps for those who are more into the Mozilla mindset, if there is such a thing. I actually haven't heard of anybody expressing a lot of interest in this one, have you?
The big question for me, for all of these, is how well do they handle email forwarding and spam filtering. Email forwarding is easy to get wrong and hard to get right. Even with big players (Apple) and email experts (Fastmail) involved, there are a lot of edge cases where you can run into the unexpected. How are they rewriting headers to prevent DMARC issues? Do visible from addresses end up looking messy? What level of spam filtering does each service have in place to try to keep spam out of the forwarded mail stream? Spam is quick poison to email forwarding; damaging the reputation of the forwarding service. At first I had assumed the Apple service would be essentially dropping mail directly into iCloud mailboxes (to bypass some of these concerns) but I get the impression that it can actually forward to "real" destination mailboxes that it doesn't host.
Looks like an opportunity for me to map out how these forwarding services accomplish what they do, unless somebody has beaten me to it. Got any expertise with any of these? Are you familiar with how spam checks or header rewriting is being done with any of them? I welcome your feedback and insight, and I'll promise to share it in a followup post.
"It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere," according to The Verge. And it's powered by email platform Fastmail, perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999, Fastmail hast a long history in the email space (unlike Hey.com) and they seem to know what they're doing (look at their recent added support for BIMI). If you want to "hide my email" but don't want to do it via the Apple ecosystem, it sounds like this is really worth checking out.
Click here for more information on Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password.
Firefox Relay is another service with a similar aim, perhaps for those who are more into the Mozilla mindset, if there is such a thing. I actually haven't heard of anybody expressing a lot of interest in this one, have you?
The big question for me, for all of these, is how well do they handle email forwarding and spam filtering. Email forwarding is easy to get wrong and hard to get right. Even with big players (Apple) and email experts (Fastmail) involved, there are a lot of edge cases where you can run into the unexpected. How are they rewriting headers to prevent DMARC issues? Do visible from addresses end up looking messy? What level of spam filtering does each service have in place to try to keep spam out of the forwarded mail stream? Spam is quick poison to email forwarding; damaging the reputation of the forwarding service. At first I had assumed the Apple service would be essentially dropping mail directly into iCloud mailboxes (to bypass some of these concerns) but I get the impression that it can actually forward to "real" destination mailboxes that it doesn't host.
Looks like an opportunity for me to map out how these forwarding services accomplish what they do, unless somebody has beaten me to it. Got any expertise with any of these? Are you familiar with how spam checks or header rewriting is being done with any of them? I welcome your feedback and insight, and I'll promise to share it in a followup post.
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