Creating a new email address on the fly, but really!

Question

I have a blogging application. When a blog post is created by the user, it will be emailed to some fellow users. I need functionality in which friends will simply reply to email, and email content will be sent as comments for this particular blog.

One way to do this is to do something similar to what http://ohlife.com does. It basically creates a unique identifier for each user per day, has the response attribute for the email address set to post+{unique_id}@ohlife.com , and probably analyzes this field to know which user the email address belongs to, when it is received. But it really only has 1 email address, which is [e-mail] . The part after the “+” is ignored by the email servers. This also applies to gmail.

What I wanted to know is this property for specific mail servers or universal? If this is not universal, is there a mail server-independent way to implement this? I would not want this to be based on the subject of email, as this is a trivial decision that I know of.

Answer 1

it depends on your mail server and how it is configured .. (although this is pretty standard) - for example, in postfix:

 recipient_delimiter = + 

You can install it on whatever you want. I once configured it as a point, so I can use it all over the Internet. http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#recipient_delimiter

but you can just configure it in your application.

Answer 2

Besides using a subject or email address, another easy way to achieve this is to simply insert the identifier number at the bottom of the outgoing email body. Then it will return to you in the quoted part of the response message. This is much less intrusive than putting material in a subject or address, and if you use HTML messages, you can even make the code invisible.