On 2009-10-23 at 20:12 -0600, Jan L. Peterson wrote: > On Fri, 2009-10-23 at 22:00 -0400, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > > you could do most of this today with plus addressing like > > > [email protected] > > > > How? I don't know of any option in exchange or gmail to enable such a > > feature. > > Actually, Gmail supports this out of the box: > http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html
Disclaimer: speaking in a personal capacity Also, Gmail canonicalises away any dots, so [email protected] == [email protected] == [email protected]. So you can use plus sub-addressing where supported and if not supported you can insert some extra dots in the address. Not so convenient, but you're working around buggy code elsewhere and I know some people who like having the option away. Also, Google Apps for your Domain supports catch-all addresses. Go to manage the domain, Email settings, main config page under "Email routing" -- you can choose what to do with "Unknown account messages" and the default is "Discard" but you can choose to route them to a catch-all address. I just checked this on the family domain account. It might be a premium feature, I don't recall. For large domains, enabling a catch-all is almost certainly a mistake. The volumes are prohibitive, even after spam-filtering. For small domains, *shrug*. On my personal email which goes to my colo-box, I used to have a catchall address. When I transitioned mail to my colo-box from a friend's machine who'd helped me out for a while, I enabled catchall on the older domain. That lasted not-very-many minutes and proved to be unwise. For a newer domain like spodhuis.org, I could get away with it for a little while. However, there are harvesters which don't understand the different between an email address and a message-id, or which break at the hyphen in "lopsa-tech". And then I got the joe-jobs from random left-hand-sides, resulting in bounces. So after a while, I gave in and demoted the catchall to "kinda works in a pinch" status -- I configured my MTA so that the catchall address only exists if the SMTP Envelope Sender is not empty. Since I never send from a catchall, this works, but it does break some sign-up. I could get away with this because I had configured my system so that if a Shared Folder in Cyrus was created, then that left-hand-side springs into existence. Ie, by creating "Shared Folders/spodhuis/bert", the address [email protected] becomes valid and is delivered to the shared folder with no further configuration. With that, my wife could just create a new folder for a new LHS and things would work. But these days, she mostly just uses Gmail anyway. She finds it much easier to use than Thunderbird. Regards, -Phil _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
