Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Relay is very cool but it took me like 24 hours since discovering and adopting it, to being unable to use it for an account. So I cannot recommend it to my family and friends who are much less tech literate than I am.

In my case I was trying to create an account on the Linux Mint Forums [1]. The confirmation email never arrived, which was very confusing to me.

[1]: https://forums.linuxmint.com/

After a couple emails with the admin, they told me this:

> The forum tried sending you the activation email but it'd rejected by the Firefox relay with this message:

    <...@relay.firefox.com>: host
        inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com[54.240.252.212] said: 550 5.7.1 TLS
        required by recipient (in reply to RCPT TO command)

> This is a known issue of the Firefox relay: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/757. I'll check but I think TLS is not under our control, same as in the linked issue.

> For now I think you'll have to use a different email address.

So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses...

> So while it looked promising, sadly the next day I was already back to using gmail addresses

I know this pain point well. Some sites, instead of using a blacklist of every single disposable e-mail service, just use a whitelist of 'popular' email domains like gmail.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com etc

This is why I have accounts with gmail and other popular e-mail providers. That's the only reason. Sad that you have to conform to be a normie just to use a website. Thank all the bots and bad faith actors for that...

> Some sites, instead of using a blacklist of every single disposable e-mail service, just use a whitelist of 'popular' email domains

This is very interesting to me as I've had my own domain for a very long time and haven't encountered this more than twice in that time. If you don't mind sharing, on what kinds of sites have you seen this?

I am not at all discounting your experience. We probably have different interests and visit different sites so I'm interested to explore that.

I have very often hit the "you can't use emails from that service here" deny list which is why I think these kinds of services are neat but will quickly be rendered useless once the deny lists are updated.

I've had it happen on my DMV's 'personalize license plate' site. In order to reserve a plate I had to provide a gmail address, and could not in fact use my personal domain or protonmail account.

(Tech lead of Relay here)

Thanks for the detail! We'll look into this. We definitely want to maximize deliverability.

Thank you very much! Just to make it clear, I still use Relay for those sites that allow me to use it, I just wouldn't recommend it to friends because this kind of hiccups mean that it's not something that one can rely on with blind eyes. Glad to see there is active interest in ironing them out.

I'm glad to hear it! It's been almost a year since I reported this bug, and I still run into web-compat issues everywhere.

Thanks for reporting it! Nothing like an influx of new users (and now premium customers!) to re-light some fire under a bug! We'll work on it.

So.. Relay require tls on incoming connections - but site sends confirmation link over plain text smtp? What site refuses to upgrade to tls these days? (or am I reading that wrong?)

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