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Ask HN: How do I solve this?

3 points by vs2370 ↗ HN
I am trying to build an app where I want to give users an email id for ex: abc@xyz.com. I am then building a parser for emails received on that email.

My problem is I am not sure how I can do the following : - give each user a unique email id

Google app emails are expensive and hosting my own mail server is complex. Is there a better way to do this? Any service, tutorials, pointers will be helpful. Thanks

8 comments

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CyberFonic
I would set up a catchall email on the domain xyz.com which sends to a single destination email address. Then generate abc001, abc002, etc email address to users to have.

On that single email address you could parse for the unique email ids and then process as you intended to. Depending on your mail provider you could simply have a POP3 or IMAP client or a full featured SMTP / MTA server.

I use a similar trick when people ask me for an email address, it is typically some.person@example.com. Then if that source spams me, etc then I can easily block emails to some.person without affecting my "real" email which is simply mail@example.com.

vs2370
this trick is completely new to me. Sorry for a basic question, how do i generate lots of email addresses is my problem. Can I achieve that without having to host my own mail server ?
saluki
You can setup a catchall email on zoho or google apps for your domain.

Basically a catch all will send any emailaddress@yourdomain.com to the main email on that domain mail@yourdomain.com for example.

Once that is setup you don't generate the emailaddress portion, you can use anything on the fly. It's basically *@yourdomain.com automatically goes to mail@yourdomain.com where you could parse them. (you could also setup forwarding for this to another domain's email if you want.)

I have this setup on one of my domains to use for testing web applications on the fly with multiple email addresses.

Good luck with your project.