Email aliases

[A Former User]

I am interested in creating email aliases on the fly, and later deleting them when they no longer are needed. My use case is to be able to create an alias for whatever service I am signing up with, say random_service@mydomain.com.

What I'd like to be able to do is just sign up, and have the alias automatically created. Then later, when random_service inevitably starts sending me spam, be able to delete the alias, no longer letting their spam through.

Currently I use a catchall account. I am able to create any email address on the fly and have it all delivered to one account. This is great, and very useful. My only issue is that I can't go back and delete any of the dynamic addresses, as they are not aliases, but catchall addresses. So I can't prevent email from being sent to my dynamic addresses, short of manually unsubscribing.

Is this possible? I don't know enough about the Cloudron email stack to know if it is, but if so, it would be a very useful addition to me, and possibly others.

Thanks!

[nebulon]

Maybe I miss some specific use-case here, but Cloudron does support email aliases. You can read more about them at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/#creating-mail-aliases

[murgero]

@nebulon said in Email aliases:

Maybe I miss some specific use-case here, but Cloudron does support email aliases. You can read more about them at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/#creating-mail-aliases

Does Cloudron support tag aliases? Example:

• email@example.com
• email+tagname@example.com

would both go to the same place in other mail systems.

[nebulon]

Yes Cloudron does support the inbox+tagname@example.com style alias out of the box without further configuration.

[A Former User]

@nebulon I do see that aliases are an option, but I've just tested them to match my use case and no luck.
What I did was create an alias and send a test email. All good. Then I deleted the alias and sent another email to it. I received it just as if I had not deleted the alias. My goal is to be able to delete aliases and no longer receive mail to those addresses, basically as a way to unsubscribe without having to involve the sender. Or to prevent spam if the address is compromised.

Hope that makes sense.

[fbartels]

@bellinom said in Email aliases:

create an alias and send a test email. All good. Then I deleted the alias and sent another email to it. I received it just as if I had not deleted the alias

You said above that you are using catch-all, could this have interfered with your test?

[murgero]

@bellinom said in Email aliases:

What I did was create an alias and send a test email. All good. Then I deleted the alias and sent another email to it. I received it just as if I had not deleted the alias.

Sometimes you have to wait after deleting an alias from the system to see it's affects. Also, you have a catch all going to your account as stated above which is probably messing with testing results too.

[A Former User]

I've looked at the email headers, it is going to the alias address and not the catchall address.

I'll wait a day or so and test the deleted alias again and see what happens.

[murgero]

@bellinom The email headers will always say the alias address if that's what's in the To: field in the email client.....

The point is, you have a catch all configured to go to the account the alias was originally made (then deleted) for, correct? If so, then that's your problem.

[d19dotca]

@murgero Yes, this is mentioned at the top of the email documentation page: https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/ Under the section "How Cloudron Email works" where it states "Email account sub-addressing by adding + tag qualifier" (though it could probably be written better and expanded on the aliases section)

[murgero]

@d19dotca said in Email aliases:

@murgero Yes, this is mentioned at the top of the email documentation page: https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/ Under the section "How Cloudron Email works" where it states "Email account sub-addressing by adding + tag qualifier" (though it could probably be written better and expanded on the aliases section)

Would ya'll be mad at me if I said I never read the documentation for admins/users, only the documentation for developers?

[nebulon]

@bellinom I've just done a test by adding an alias, confirming that it can receive email, then removing the alias again. After removing the alias becomes immediately invalid and the sender will get an email is undeliverable mail. As others have suggested, the catchall may interfere with your testing setup in this case or there is indeed a bug somewhere which I cannot reproduce.

[A Former User]

Looks like it was in fact getting sent to the catchall. Thanks everyone for your input.