[Feature Request] Creating permanent "temporary" aliases

TravelTimer

Hi,
I’d really like to have a way for mailbox accounts to create randomly generated aliases that stay valid forever. It should all basically work the same as creating “temporary” aliases, but instead of picking an expiry date there should also be an option to never let it expire.

Background: I want to use unique E-Mail addresses for every online service I register on, so that blocking them if necessary is trivial. Using expiring aliases for this is not sufficient, as I’d like to be able to still receive potentially important E-Mails years after I registered them. It should also be possible to use without the admin account, since I also want my family members to make use of this feature.

Someone already made a thread about it here, but it didn’t get much of a response

AllgaeuerBraunvie

For my wife i have setup a simple thing - just setup a subdomain with a catch all. So by default she is just using unique names for every service without the need of initializing them. Just think of a random name, like facebook@wife.example.com and so on - in case of spam you can just explicitly redirect that specific email to the trash. Nice thing is that this also works on the fly on the phone or in the supermarket while filling out some form when no PC is around. And in the end everything is redirected internally to the main mailbox wife@example.com

TravelTimer

AllgaeuerBraunvie This could be a sufficient workaround, but I don’t want to mess with DNS everytime I add a new user. And someone seeing those subdomains may figure out what is going on and send mails to arbitrary addresses on that domain (I consider this very unlikely though). Being able to quickly make up a new address that works is a great advantage though. Maybe there is a way for the admin to create aliases that match a regex?
For example every E-Mail where the recipient matches abcd*@example.org will be forwarded to user@example.org. The user can then quickly make up abcdfacebook@example.org and can always receive (or block) it. Every user would get their own unique prefix they can arbitrarily use. To make it easier to remember, those prefixes could just be short words.
Problem is I don’t see a way to do this either. I guess the only way to do something like this right now is subdomains…

tbrummell

Or, use the + feature, like this:
Your email: name@domain.com
Use: name+facebook@domain.com

All emails will come with facebook tagged in the subject line, so you’ll know exactly who sold your email address. 🙂

TravelTimer

tbrummell I have considered this, but it seems too trivial to find out the real address of the user (just remove everything after the +). And since some big E-Mail providers also have this I’m sure spammers will eventually account for it

AllgaeuerBraunvie

TravelTimer you don’t need to mess with DNS. You can set a catchall for smtp also. *.example.com. Then it is just configuration in Mailcow. For me it is working fine for almost 20 years now.

Any you can allow users to administrate “their” subdomain.

TravelTimer

Ok I settled for a mix of all solutions. user@example.org gets a short alias, for example dog@example.org, and is then able to give out addresses like dog+facebook@example.org. This way the real address is not revealed, users can quickly make something up, no messing around with subdomains, and it’s fairly easy to configure for the admin. It’s still not perfect since a spammer can just enter something after the + and have it go through, but I at least have the ability to block mails that directly go to dog@example.org.