[u-u] Odds and Ends

[Bill Duncan]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 09:01:44AM -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> At Tue, 24 Jul 2018 05:28:53 -0400, Adam Holland <ajh8888 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Subject: Re: [u-u] Odds and Ends
> > 
> > The quickest way I can implement all your great advice is to have two
> > secondary accounts, one for the wanted volume from mailing lists and one
> > for the unwanted volume from commercial sites who will likely spam me after
> > registration. With /etc/aliases, I understand that I can assign a bunch of
> > email addresses to either of these two accounts.  This will result in a
> > cluttered but presorted pair of mailboxes which can be further filtered
> > based on the incoming address, later down the line.
> 
> Yes, what you propose should work well and be reasonably easy to manage.
> 
> Note for those who don't directly manage their own mail server
> (i.e. those who cannot edit their MTA's equivalent of /etc/alises), many
> MTAs will allow somewhat arbitrary suffixes to be appended to the main
> "local" part (username) of the address (e.g. separated by a '+', or
> sometimes a '-' or '.'), passing them all to the same main INBOX, and
> then those can be used either by the MUA and/or server-side filtering
> such as Sieve to sort mail into different folders.
> 
> I do a little of all three (aliases, multiple mailboxes, and suffixes),
> plus multiple domains all on the same mail server.

Greg's idea works well for me. I still use exim, run multiple domains etc.

But I mostly use the suffix portion. As an additional feature, I can
sometimes identify who's mail list has been compromised and thereafter
send everything going to the to /dev/null.

For example, if I'm sending a first email to Acme Corp, I might send it as:

   bduncan-acme at beachnet.org

Or mail lists, I might subscribe as:  bduncan-borglist at beachnet.org

As a side benefit, I can set up suffixes to do something for me, like
echo a message with all the mail headers (so I can diagnose issues).

  bduncan-echo at beachnet.org

..and you'll see your email, complete with headers.

Anyway, it's a great way to sort through stuff. You can set specific
suffixes to go directly to a specific file without hitting your inbox.
I do that a lot..

-- 
Bill Duncan,         | http://billduncan.org/
bduncan at beachnet.org | - linux/unix/network
+1 416 697-9315      | - performance engineering