On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 03:42:55PM -0700, Joe Emenaker wrote: > I was wondering if anyone has implemented something like the following: > Supposed I have an email address: bill@domain.com > I want to be able to append something arbitrary to the end of the username, like so... > bill-1@domain.com > bill-2@domain.com > bill-newyorktimes@domain.com > etc. > and have them treated in this particular way: > Each of these addresses would deliver to bill@domain.com's real mailbox the FIRST time they were ever seen, and then for some fixed number of messages and/or time limit after that. For example, the first five > could get through, or any that arrive within 2 days of the first one, etc. All messages to that address after that would get tossed in some other folder or deleted outright. *Additionally*, it would be nice to > maintain a count of the messages that have arrived for each address. > The purpose is probably obvious. I want throw-away addresses to use for registering at websites. I know Mailinator does this, but I don't want to go fetch them like that... and I *also* would love to have some > metrics of how much extra mail I get from various websites. For example, if I register at youtube with bill-youtube@domain.com, and I later discover that a few hundred messages have come in for that address, > well... then we'd know that they sell their addresses to lots of people. I'm not sure what *good* that information does me, but it would be nice to know. > And it doesn't have to be a hyphen for the separator, but I know that a couple of the popular MTA's use the hyphen for purposes similar to this... so it might be the path of least resistance. > Anybody implemented something like that? I would suggest the easy way is to use the '+' extension seperator (or whatever you've configured the extension character to be, if you're using an MTA that supports it) which gives you the first behvaiour for free, and then just change your mailbox filter rules after you receive the email you want to receive to either log and dump, or just file into Junk/<extension>. This means the junk would still _arrive_ at your MUA, but you wouldn't have to look at it. ^_^ The only risk is that apparently spammers have taken to dropping things after a '+' to avoid just this sort of filtering. If I were starting a _new_ email address, I'd make the primary published address include a '+' so I could be sure anything without the '+' was spam trying to hide its origin and could therefore be filtered... -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Paul "TBBle" Hampson, B.Sc, LPI, MCSE On-hiatus Asian Studies student, ANU The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361) Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did, we'd be running around in darkened rooms, popping pills and listening to repetitive music. -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.1/au/ -----------------------------------------------------------
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