[olug] Disposable Email Address Software

William E. Kempf william at kempfville.com
Fri Oct 22 18:59:18 UTC 2004


I've got an interesting question for you all.  I can create email aliases
for my domain that forward email to other addresses.  A neat little trick
to fight spam is to use these addresses for public use, and have them
forward to a private account.  The only problem with this is that if you
reply to a message received from one of these "disposable" accounts (this
really is the term used... there's a number of "disposable email address"
services available), your real account will be revealed in many of the
headers... including the From header!

The DEA (disposable email address) services handle this for you,
translating important headers to show the proper address and removing
other headers that shouldn't be seen by the outside world.  Unfortunately,
these services all either want to charge you (and I'm a cheap SOB) or
severely restrict the amount of traffic they can handle.  This is
understandable, but won't work for me.

So, what I want is to be able to run my own service for this.  But I can't
find anything that does this.  The only package I have found is
spamgourmet (http://sourceforge.net/projects/spamgourmet/), but this
software I believe to be fatally flawed (not needing to register new
accounts means that spammers can spam you simply by sending to bogus email
addresses, and watch words are an ineffective means of preventing this).

Anyone know of software that would allow me to do this?

-- 
William E. Kempf



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