
Ask HN: How do I solve this? - vs2370
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.<p>My problem is I am not sure how I can do the following :
- give each user a unique email id<p>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
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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.

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c22
It looks perhaps unmaintained these days, but in the past I solved a similar
problem using Lamson.

Lamson: [https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson](https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson)

Previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612642)

~~~
vs2370
thanks. I work in python so this looks promising

------
max_
I recommend Namecheap's [Email
Hosting]([https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx](https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx))

~~~
vs2370
thanks i will try it out

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mtmail
Search for "inbound email parsing" services, e.g.
[http://www.mailgun.com/inbound-routing](http://www.mailgun.com/inbound-
routing) or [https://postmarkapp.com/](https://postmarkapp.com/)

