Posts tagged email
Automatic disposable email addresses for Google Apps
Aug 29th
Plus Suffixing
There’s a pretty nifty feature with gmail that most people don’t know about. I’ve seen people reference it as the “plus hack” or “plus suffixing”. If you have username@gmail.com, you can add a “+” followed by any letters and numbers, and it will still be delivered to username@gmail.com.
I’ve been using this for corporate email forms — if facebook wants an email, they get matthew+facebook, for example. I can then add a precise filter on that “To:” address and delete all email from that company if it “goes evil.”
There’s a glitch in plus suffixing, though — most web forms don’t realize that the plus sign is a totally valid email character, and will reject your plus-suffixed hack.
So what to do?
Well, if you’re using gmail, you’re out of luck. But if you’re using a google apps account for a custom domain (say, your company or family), and you are an administrator for that domain, you can enable “minus suffixing”!
Maildir auto-archive
Apr 12th
If you’ve got your mail sitting on some server and in Maildir format, and you’ve used Outlook’s “Auto Archive” feature, you might wish that your inbox (and subdirectory contents) could be automatically swept clean of items older than, say, 3 weeks, and shoved into a Year/Quarter sub folder (like “Inbox/2008/Q1/”).
A couple years ago I wanted this too. So I wrote a cronjob and perl script to make this happen.
Installation is straightforward:
- Copy the shell script that cron calls, autoarchive, and the perl script, autoarchive.pl, onto the server holding your Maildir.
- Edit the autoarchive shellscript to make sure the path and –max-days is ok with you.
- Make both scripts executable with
chmod u+x - Make a backup of your mail. This is GPL code. No warranty is implied. Read the code and try it out with –dry-run first.
- Calling autoarchive.pl with the “–dry-run” option will let you make sure it’s doing what you want it to do. If it does, delete the dry-run.
- Wire it up to cron with something like:
PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/bin 42 10 * * * autoarchive > /dev/null