Add reply to emails

[pdehaan]

I created an alias and sent myself an email from my personal gmail account.
The email redirected to my work account as expected, but I was unable to reply to the email and get the response to my personal gmail address.

@groovecoder said it was a known issue, but I didn't see an issue for it.

[groovecoder]

The fix here is to create a reply address for each sender to a relay address … so:

1. sender@example.com sends to abcdef123@relay.firefox.com
2. We create zyxwvu987@relay.firefox.com to send to sender@example.com
3. We put Reply-To: zyxwvu987@relay.firefox.com on the email when we send it
4. Real address of abcdef... replies
5. We receive the reply email for zyxwvu987@relay.firefox.com and relay it to sender@example.com with Reply-To: abcdef123@relay.firefox.com
6. We repeat steps 3-5 for as many emails as the participants send to each other

[jest]

This is a bit more complicated than described by @groovecoder, if you want to protect the privacy of the user replying to the e-mail. The real user's address might be revealed in some headers of the message, mainly Received — those should be removed at relay.firefox.com MX host I guess.

Also, to avoid the risk of being an open relay, you might consider creating a unique Reply-To address per-message, not per-original sender. Although this leads to ever-growing mapping UID -> address... Anyway, replying is harder than just receiving mail. :)

[jest]

I just checked, 33mail uses different Reply-to addresses for messages received from the same sender. So there must be some rationale behind it.

[halloall]

That will somehow cause spam, and then Mozilla will be eligible to become an email provider ...

[xanoni]

One thing that would be important here is to at least attempt to filter out identifying information from the body and headers of the email that is quoted / responded to.

E.g., we don't want the real email address to appear when replying-all to our own emails ("On Jan 1st, 2021 real@email.com wrote:").

[quinncomendant]

This feature needs to include the ability to initiate an email conversation from a relay address:

1. I create a new Firefox Relay email address.
2. I compose a new message to a recipient.
3. The recipient receives an anonymized email message with the From header set to my relay address.
4. Their reply is forwarded to my real email address (anonymously)
5. I'm able to reply to the reply (anonymously), and steps 3–5 repeat to keep the thread going.

So far, Firefox Relay only supports step 4, which only works when you give the third-party the relay email address out-of-band and they initiate the conversation.

AnonAddy, a Firefox Relay competitor, solves this by providing a way to send initiate email conversations by sending an email to a special anonaddy.com address that contains the final recipient's address encoded in the address, like this:

• Hypothetical AnonAddy forwarding address: myalias@myuser.anonaddy.com (equivalent to myalias@relay.firefox.com address).
• To send an anonymous email to recipient@example.com, I compose an email from my normal email client (Gmail, Apple Mail, et al) and send it to: myalias+recipient=example.com@myuser.anonaddy.com. When the recipient receives the message, they see myalias@myuser.anonaddy.com as the From address.
• When they reply to me, their message arrives with the Reply-To header set to myalias+recipient=example.com@myuser.anonaddy.com so I can easily reply anonymously from my mail client.

[flodolo]

Why is this issue linked to this string?
https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/fx-private-relay-l10n/blob/main/en/app.ftl#L166-L169

[Vinnl]

@flodolo That appears to have been a mistake; will be fixed here: mozilla-l10n/fx-private-relay-l10n#28.

[githubacc02442]

Hope it is okay to ask here:

• Is the reply feature going to be for both premium and free users? or just premium users only?
• If we ever get a reply feature, please allow the generation of a reply/reverse alias on the extension.
• Will there be an increase in the attachment size? That 150kb really sucks if we ever receive important files.
• I've seen a clip of the Privacy Pack costing $5/month for VPN and Relay. However, will users be allowed to purchase a Relay subscription only? If so, is there a price set for it currently, or not yet decided? Kinda pointless to purchase the pack if VPN isn't available in a user's country.

[tcinotto]

@githubacc02442 Thank you for the feedback! We'll be sharing out more details on the Replies feature very shortly and hope that you will enjoy the new experience! The additional feedback around attachment size and subscriptions, we hear you and are listening to your feedback on how to improve the experience, so please keep it coming. Please stay tuned as I think we'll have some exciting information coming soon.

[rafalkrupinski]

Hi, is there an update on this feature?

[Vinnl]

Apologies @rafalkrupinski, indeed replying is now available to Premium users. See https://relay.firefox.com/premium/

[rafalkrupinski]

Thank you @Vinnl , I was wondering if the ability to initiate conversations is planned.

[Vinnl]

At the current time, I believe it is not, as it avoids the masks being used for abuse (e.g. spam) - it's one argument we can use to keep Relay addresses off of blocklists. Possibly we'll be able to come up with other anti-abuse measures in the future that allow us to enable that functionality.