EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorEmail (Personal)Headquarters: US

Firefox Relay: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Firefox Relay is a service from Mozilla that shields your email address and phone number. It generates random email masks that forward messages to your real inbox and offers phone masks for calls and text messages. Relay can strip common email trackers, and you manage masks through a dashboard and a browser extension. Mozilla runs it as a hosted web service, and the source code is published on GitHub under the MPL 2.0 licence.

Mozilla is a US organisation, so Relay falls under US jurisdiction. According to the privacy notice, Amazon Web Services receives and forwards email for the masks, and Twilio processes phone numbers and text message content. Mozilla says it does not read or store message content, and IP addresses stay in server logs for 90 days. The notice does not mention the GDPR and does not state where data is stored. Users should keep in mind that email metadata and the list of masks are held by a US provider.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Firefox Relay pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
49 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-30
    No hosting in Europe (US)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-665
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 11, 2026
Headquarters
US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
USVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Email (Personal)
Type
Product
Website
relay.firefox.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Firefox Relay

The European alternatives to Firefox Relay come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

30 European Email (Personal) vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Firefox Relay

Firefox Relay is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Firefox Relay hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Firefox Relay is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Firefox Relay together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Firefox Relay?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Firefox Relay include Bluewin Mail, CounterMail and Disroot. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Firefox Relay?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Firefox Relay include Disroot. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Firefox Relay GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Firefox Relay is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 11, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Email (Personal)

Email (Personal): Personal email services — inbox, calendar, contacts. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Firefox Relay — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score