Mail Relay Tutorials
Learn how to use the different features with our collection of tutorials.Account Management
Email Management
Encryption Setup
Don't have an account yet?
Frequently Asked Questions
Mail Relay is Privacy Portal's email privacy service. It enables you to hide your personal email from third-parties, thus protecting your identity online and helping you reduce your digital
footprint. After creating your free account using your personal email, you can easily create “Privacy Aliases” that forward emails to your personal inbox. These addresses are safe to share with
third-parties and can be disabled at any point in time, giving you full control over spam and unsolicited mail. With Enhanced Protection, you can also protect your emails from prying eyes. It allows you to encrypt all incoming mail before relaying it to your personal email. Your email provider will no
longer have the ability to read your emails. Only you can decrypt emails on-device, protecting you from being a target for advertisers and data brokers. Create your free account today!
Your personal email is considered as "Personally Identifiable Information". It can easily be linked to your identity. Using the same email address for all your accounts makes it extremely
easy for advertisers, data brokers, and governments to connect your accounts and aggregate your data to profile you. Using unique addresses for every service shrinks your digital footprint and
makes you a smaller target. From a security perspective, using different email addresses for different services helps protect you against data breaches and "Credential Stuffing" attacks. Due to the increasing amount of
data breaches, stolen user credentials are becoming easy to purchase on the dark web. Using unique email addresses immediately protects you from these types of attacks.
Privacy Aliases are generated email addresses that forward emails to your personal inbox. With aliases, you can use your personal email account to communicate with websites or individuals
without them knowing your personal email address. This helps you conceal your identity and gives you the power to eliminate any source of spam by simply deactivating the corresponding alias. With Enhanced Protection, aliases can also encrypt your emails using PGP or S/MIME, preventing your email provider from reading your messages.
Start by creating your free account by signing up with your personal email address. Once logged in, you can press on 'New Alias' and automatically a unique “Privacy Alias” gets generated for
you. All that's left is to label it to quickly identify its purpose in the future. With Enhanced Protection, you get full control over Privacy Aliases.
No, Privacy Aliases do not expire and are designed be used as permanent aliases for your personal email address. That said, if no longer needed, a Privacy Alias can be deactivated or
permanently deleted at any point in time.
We follow security best practices at every step of the way. We minimize the use of user data to the strictest minimum. Security and privacy are our top priorities when designing new features.
We use passwordless authentication to protect our customers from a whole range of threats such as phishing and credential theft. We use zero-trust deployments for our services. We encrypt all
internal and external data whether in-transit or at-rest. We leverage modern encryption algorithms such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
We minimize our use of personal data to the strictest minimum. We process all relayed emails in-memory. We do not store any of your emails. Check out our Privacy Policy. We apply the highest standards for security and privacy across the board. All connections, including internal ones, are TLS encrypted. All servers and databases use full disk encryption. All
database backups are encrypted. We use passwordless logins to protect you from credential theft and fishing attacks. We don't share any of your personal information with third parties.
We do not store any emails, not even temporarily. All emails are processed in-memory and are never written to disk nor stored in any database. We have designed our email processing pipeline from the ground up to be the gold standard for privacy.
We do not read your emails. Our email servers are automated and process emails without any human intervention. Your emails are processed in-memory and are never stored in a database or
written to disk. Once an email is processed it ceases to exist on our systems.
Mail Relay enforces TLS encryption to all incoming and outgoing connections. If an email provider does not support TLS encryption, the emails won't be accepted. With Enhanced Protection, Mail Relay encrypts all inbound mail upon reception before relaying it to the receiver's email provider. For email replies, encrypted emails get decrypted by Mail
Relay before getting relayed to the destination. This means your email provider will not be able to access the contents of the relayed emails. The 3rd party email provider will have the
ability to see the contents of the emails but will not be able to link it to your personal email address.
When your Enhanced Protection subscription ends, your existing Privacy Aliases will continue to forward emails as usual, but you will no longer have access to email encryption features. Additionally, if you've reached the alias limit in the Basic Protection plan, you won't be able to create new Privacy Aliases.
When enabled, Mail Relay encrypts all inbound mail with your public PGP key. Only you can decrypt the emails with on-device decryption. Mail Relay also accepts encrypted outbound mail thus denying your email provider from any access to the content of your emails.
If your preferred email client only supports S/MIME, you can use Mail Relay's S/MIME encryption to encrypt all your emails. Mail Relay helps you issue certificate chains in your browser
without exposing your private key to us. Similarly to PGP, Mail Relay supports S/MIME encryption for both inbound and outbound mail.
At Privacy Portal, we avoid building features that could give a false sense of privacy. We think enabling custom domains goes against our privacy goals. In most cases, you would be right to
assume that all emails under a custom domain belong to the domain owner. We provide domains owned by Privacy Portal and shared across all our users for better privacy.
To help us increase email deliverability to your inbox, please do not "mark as spam" any emails relayed to you by Mail Relay. We work hard to prevent any spam from reaching your
inbox. But in case one of the online services you registered to is spamming you, you can simply deactivate the corresponding "Privacy Alias".
It is possible for your email provider to flag emails from unknown or new addresses as spam. If that happens, you should mark these emails as not spam (or move them to your inbox). To make sure you always receive emails to your inbox, you can configure your filters to mark all emails from our domains as "not spam". learn more.
Our servers are currently hosted in Switzerland, one of the best jurisdictions for online privacy and internet freedoms. More privacy friendly jurisdictions could be used in the future.