Server for proxying emails for the purpose of hiding original address

For an application we are building, it is required to give certain registered accounts the ability to send emails to other registered accounts.

As part of the registration, we obviously collect the real email address of every user.

I do not want to expose any of my users' email addresses so I would like to have the ability to proxy them through fake email address that basically forward to the real email address.

For example, if someone want's to email John Doe, they would send an email to abcdefg12345@mysite.com which would then forward the email to john@johndoe.com.

In case its not obvious, the purpose of this is to protect the end user from spam and keeps their real email address private. Since my application acts as the proxy, I could easily block certain email's from going through.

The most famous example of this is Facebook's email proxy for Facebook Apps.

My Question: Are there any开发者_如何转开发 patterns, servers, 3rd party services, or libraries that provide such a feature? Does anyone have any suggestions for how this could be built?

---

I've never seen a service that offers this directly. The hardest part here is the receiving of the emails and wiring things up to your app for the authentication. You could use a service like http://cloudmailin.com in order to receive the email and then forward it on or even use some sort of custom install. Another option would be to create a script that modifies a server such as postfix's configuration.

Finally although I wouldn't recommend it you could try and create your own mail server to do this. I would read up a little more on SMTP/IMAP and see what options you have.

---

It looks like there is no 3rd party service or tool\library to accomplish this. It is going to be a bigger task than I was hoping for so I will be putting it off until I have the time to implement it.

I think the solution is to use a mail daemon that has an API or at least allows you to manipulate the users\emails\aliases in it such that you can create new mailboxes on demand and set them to forward from someuser@proxy.mysite.com to user@theirdomain.com

---

I found out that there are services that provide this type of functionality as part of their offerings:

• http://mailgun.net/
• http://www.sendgrid.com

Both of these services are very cool and offer quite a bit for sending and analyzing emails including the ability to create forwarding\proxy emails.