Think about the last thing you bought online. Before the shop would take your money, it took your email address - and with it, a permanent line into your inbox. Maybe you got a receipt and a dispatch note and nothing else. More likely you also got a welcome campaign, a "we miss you" campaign, a Black Friday campaign, and, eighteen months later, a breach notification explaining that your address is now on a list being traded somewhere unpleasant.
Today we are launching Scroogle Relay, and the idea fits in one sentence: the shop gets an address that works for your order, and never gets the address that works for your life.
How it works: ord- and acc-
Relay generates disposable addresses on our infrastructure and forwards what arrives on them into your encrypted mailbox. There are two kinds, and the prefix tells you which is which.
An order relay looks like
ord-7k3fq@scrooglemail.com. It is minted for a
single purchase. The shop uses it for the receipt, payment
confirmation and delivery updates - everything a checkout
legitimately needs email for. When the order is done, the address
has served its purpose. You can keep it open, or close it with one
click and that line into your inbox goes dead forever.
An account relay looks like
acc-m9x2d@scrooglemail.com. It is for shops and
services you have an ongoing relationship with - the supermarket
you order from every week, the ticketing site you actually want to
hear from. It persists across orders, works for password resets,
and can still be binned the day the relationship sours.
In both cases the shop sees a working, deliverable address and nothing more. Your real address never enters their database, never gets matched against an ad platform's identity graph, and never appears in their breach when - statistically, eventually - they have one.
Why shops want this too
You might expect merchants to hate the idea. The ones we have been piloting with since March mostly asked when they could switch it on, for two blunt commercial reasons.
First, conversion. The email field is where guest
checkouts go to die. A meaningful slice of shoppers hesitate there,
because they know exactly what typing a real address costs them.
Pilot merchants offering a "no email needed" checkout path saw
fewer abandoned baskets at that step - people who would have
walked, or typed asdf@asdf.com and then never received
their delivery updates, completed the purchase instead. A relay
address is deliverable, so the operational emails actually arrive
and the "where is my order?" support tickets go down, not up.
Second, liability. A merchant holding ten thousand relay addresses is holding almost nothing worth stealing. Under UK GDPR and the Swiss FADP, the less personal data you store, the smaller your risk surface and your breach-notification headache. We built Relay for shoppers, but "we cannot leak what we never had" turns out to be a sales pitch merchants understand instantly.
Try Scroogle Mail
Relay is included on every paid plan, alongside encrypted email, aliases and custom domains. From £2.99 a month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Create your addressWhat Relay is not
A few honest boundaries, because we would rather set expectations here than in a support ticket. Relay hides your address, not your identity: the shop still knows your name and where to send the parcel, because it is posting you a parcel. Mail forwarded through Relay is stored in your mailbox with the same zero-access encryption as everything else, but the hop from the shop to us is ordinary email, protected in transit by TLS rather than end-to-end encryption. And Relay will not stop a shop emailing the relay address with marketing - it just means that when they do, you close the door and the problem is permanently solved.
Available today
Relay is live now for every Scroogle Mail plan. You will find a new Relay tab in the web app, where you can mint an address in one click, see which merchant each one belongs to, and close any of them. If you run an online shop and want to offer the email-less checkout path natively, the merchant integration - including our transactional API, Scroogle Send - is documented on the Scroogle Relay for Business page.
The email field has been the quiet tax on every online purchase for thirty years. We think checkout works better without it.