[TriLUG] OT: Personal Email Vendor Selection

[Aaron Joyner]

I use Google Apps to host my email, and the Groups API to manage
actual lists.  An example would be if I purchase something from Sears,
and they want my email address, that's quite okay.  I give them
sears at joyner.ws.

I can whip out my Android phone, login to a linux box with ConnectBot
(one click on the machine-specific shortcut on the home screen, RSA
key pair an secures the login) type "aa sears", hit enter, and voila
-- a mailing list is created, to which only my actual email address is
subscribed.  The backing magic is a python script (aa, short for add
address), which basically just does this:

import gdata.apps.groups.service
gs = gdata.apps.groups.service.GroupsService(email=email,
domain=domain, password=password)
gs.ProgrammaticLogin()
gs.CreateGroup(alias, alias, description, 'Anyone')
gs.AddMemberToGroup(username, alias)

If you'd like a more complete copy of the script with sanity checking,
support for multiple groups, reading an application specific password
from a file, etc, etc... send me a private email.

If someone abuse my trust and gives that address to a third party,
I'll readily know who has given the address away, and I can easily
turn off the address via the Groups web interface.  If it's something
that I might still occasionally want to receive mail for (password
reset emails, or what not), I can turn on archiving and set the group
to Web Only delivery.  Then, it doesn't actually send me email, but if
I know they've sent something I want to read I can go look up what the
message said.  If you're familiar with Google Apps, you might ask why
I don't use nicknames rather than actual Groups for this purpose, and
the answer is that you can only have 30 nicknames for a single
account.  I have more than 300 hundred of these custom addresses, and
some of them direct mail to more than one person.  For example, the
customized group for my son's daycare sends mail to my wife and me.

This is a minor improvement on my older mechanism of managing an
/etc/aliases file with a list of alternate email addresses.  The
number of addresses I've had to actually turn off over the years is in
the single digits, but it goes a long way towards improving my peace
of mind.

I've always thought the + tagging of mail was kind of pointless
against truly shady characters.  If I'm a bulk emailer, the first
thing I'm going to do with the list of target addresses is the
equivalent of s/+.*@/@/.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

PS - Yes, if you consult the archives you'll see that I very briefly
used trilug at joyner.ws when I first joined the mailing list.
Originating mail from hundreds of addresses, while possible, is a bit
more of a hassle.  Thus, I decided that for TriLUG, and a few other
online communities, I'd just eat the spam burden of using my normal
address for outgoing mail.  That moment marked the point in my history
of email where spam to my personal inbox took a sharp
hockey-stick-like upward spike to the right, ultimately leading me to
Google Apps to  let someone else manage the spam filtering more
effectively than I had time for.


On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 11:54 AM, David Burton <ncdave4life at gmail.com> wrote:
> For that situation, use mailinator <http://mailinator.com/>.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Igor Partola <igor at igorpartola.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the use case is that you give your email to some shady website
>> where
>> you suspect they'd sell your email to spammers, but you still for whatever
>> reason need to get past the form and get the confirmation email. This way,
>> you can immediately mark ipartola+foobar at gmail.com as spam, get the
>> initial
>> email from the spam folder, and forget about the rest. Even if the emails
>> to
>> that address are no longer coming from foobar.com, they are still
>> filtered.
>>
> --
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