SoGo - allow „dynamic from address“

qupfer

Hi,
I‘m using a domain with a single mailbox and a catch all alias.
Sometimes, I need to answer with one of the used aliases.
At the moment, I create a explicit alias for that purpose, select it in SoGo and send the mail.

But is it possible to disable to from address check in SoGo and allow all?
If I modify the from address, the sending button is greyed out. It still works, but use the default/main name (in my case info@domain)

Thanks
Henning

Crazyphil

Yes, this is exactly my situation as well. Even if you can send mails via SMTP from these addresses, they are not accepted as valid in SOGo, even though the “From” field is an editable text field. The same situation btw also exists for tagged mail addresses (like user+tag@example.com).

Is there any way to allow sending mails from such addresses using SOGo? It’s rather annoying always having to create an explicit alias whenever such an address is used, as it requires admin access, particularly as I can already configure a sender policy for the mailbox to allow sending from any address in the domain.

esackbauer

why not using temporary alias addresses, you don’t need admin access to create or delete one.

Crazyphil

I can’t speak for @qupfer, but my use case is this: for my mail domain example.com, I’ve created a catch-all domain catchall.example.com where every mail to any address is forwarded to user@example.com. Now, whenever I have to register on a website, I can just make up any address and create an account for it. This way, should user data be leaked in the future from this particular website, I can uniquely trace its origins, because the alias tells me which service was responsible for the leak.

Temporary addresses don’t really fit this use case, because

they have to exist before the address is used, so I would have to access the management UI every time I want to create a new account (and accounts are everywhere today!)
they have an expiration date by default, but I don’t want the addresses to time out because it still is associated to an account (I know that the expiration date can be changed, but this again requires additional configuration)
they are random, and whenever a temporary alias (accidentially) timed out I would never again be able to access the account in cases where mailbox access is required

Address tags also don’t fit my use case (apart from suffering the same problem as described in this thread), because

nowadays, every spammer knows about them and just assumes that anything before the + is the actual address, and simple removes the tag before selling your personal data
the + is an unusual character for mail addresses, and websites with bad validation don’t accept them (I’ve encountered this situation multiple times, which is the reason I switched to a catch-all domain)
the address gets rather long an clumsy to type on a mobile device

maddler

I use master-random@mydomain.com for that same purpose. I just had to set “disable sender check for domain *” to let the user(s) send with any of the randomly generated email aliases. There’s also a nice Thunderbird add-on to automatically pick that up while replying to emails.

Crazyphil

Sorry, I can’t confirm that. Even when I disable all sender checks (by checking the option you mention) SOGo doesn’t accept any arbitrary sender addresses. With Thunderbird via SMTP I never had a problem. Actually, I didn’t really expect your suggestion to work, because I had already disabled sender checks for the wildcard domain without success.

mooCH

I have the same problem. It’s definitively a SOGo problem though, as you mentioned, it works perfectly with other email clients.
A workaround is that you need to add a new identity in SOGo (Preferences/Mail/IMAP accounts/choose your account (pencil icon) and click on “new identity”). Then you can choose that new identity when writing new emails or replying to messages that arrived for that identity. Definitively a PITA, but I don’t really need to reply to those messages often.
I guess that SOGo didn’t want to allow anyone to choose any random *@domain.tld address, which is quite dangerous indeed. If you share the domain with other people, they could inpersonate you.

maddler

That’s fairly simple to send mail as someone else, if you really want to and, anyway, as you pointed out you’d just need to create a new persona in your configs. I’d rather see this as a SoGo bug rather than a feature?
I use RoundCuen and Thunderbird and it works just fine with “dynamic” aliases.

mooCH

Totally agree; this is definitively a SOGo bug. But I have no experience with filing bugs for them, sorry.

Crazyphil

Well, that’s the question, really. Is it a SOGo bug or a Mailcow bug? I configure a setting in the Mailcow preferences that isn’t reflected within SOGo. Whether Mailcow doesn’t correctly instruct SOGo for different senders or whether SOGo doesn’t support such a scenario is not obvious to me without looking at the internals.

maddler

Considering that works with RoundCube and Thunderbird, I’d tend to agree that’s a SoGo limitation.
But, yes, it might be useful to check what happens behind the scenes.
No harm in a FR maybe?

Crazyphil

I’ve created a feature request on GitHub. Feel free to comment if you feel like I’ve missed something. Let’s see how it goes and whether we have to relay the issue to SOGo.