Newmail: Generating random email aliases on OpenSMPTD

newmail is a simple script to generate random e-mail aliases from the command line for OpenSMTP on OpenBSD. I wrote this to avoid having to give out my real e-mail address to every place which requires registration.

whichemail queries the aliases for previously generated e-mails.

• Source repository resides on DarcsHub

Usage

To get a new e-mail address, you simply run newmail , with an optional argument identifying the site you associate with this address:

[email protected]$ newmail hub.darcs.net
[email protected]

And if you later forgot which one you had generated:

[email protected]$ whichmail hub.darcs.net
[email protected]

How does it work?

After running newmail , the following lines have been added to /etc/mail/aliases :

# f5cb7a763186dea37d3f98f7ce9bae6a9449587892acd69f89f88bcae71e694f
pemovrypur:     user

whichmail
user

Requirements

• A working mail server.
• apg , for reasonable looking random addresses, available as a package as an OpenBSD package .
• rc and ssam from plan9port also an OpenBSD package.

Installation

• newmail , create new aliases
• whichmail , query existing aliases

Download and copy the above scripts to

/usr/local/bin/newmail
/usr/local/bin/whichmail

Edit the configuration variables at the top of the script. Remember to read through the source files to understand what they do. Then consider applying a few conveniences to your system configuration.

The following line in /etc/doas.conf enables usersto run it:

permit nopass :users as root cmd newmail

For ease of use, I also added the following to /etc/skel/.profile and current users $HOME/.profile :

alias newmail='doas newmail'

Source

The scripts are written in rc (the shell of Plan9port ). You can easily port them to any other shell your self. The newmail script itself is roughly ten lines.

• The source repository resides on DarcsHub
• The main script is here .