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Comment by yonrg | Hacker News Reader

The idea of on-demand addresses is great. I operate my mail server since 2006 now and implemented such feature straight away. I started to never use the same mail address again. name-something@domain just forwards to the inbox of name. After a time I lost track about all the addresses I "generated".

But one thing was nice, I registered my mail with a hotline agent via phone. I told them my mail is name-$YOURCOMPANYNAME@domain. They replied, oh you are a colleague, then I can give you discount :)

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How did you end up resolving the issue with too many generated emails addresses? I built and use my own domain inbox which buckets emails by email addresses (https://PretzelBox.cc) but more and more, I find myself using just one or two email addresses.

- Simple PHP web page for adding and listing existing aliases to/from a database. Adding a new alias has to be quick. Type in a description, and copy out the generated alias to clipboard for use elsewhere.

- Startup script that fetches the aliases from DB and modifies a mail client configuration so that all randomly generated addresses are annotated with a short descriptive text indicating to whom the address was issued and makes it so that replying sets the From header to the alias.

This combo works well for me.

Actually, I do not actively generate, meaning create, a new addresses. I use a filter I'm the delivery process in Exim which truncates a suffix from the local name.

Keeping track of addresses is still worth it, regardless of how they're implemented.

My way dealing with email has converged over the years to the following.

First, there two different kind of on-demand addresses.

1. Registration, these emails are stored in the password manager

2. Throw away, one time addresses

Second, I maintain a two mail folder method: inbox and archive. Sent mails are put into inbox, too. This makes mail threads a whole. From there they are either purged if spam or moved over to archive.

From here I can answer your question, how I manage all those generated addresses. The folders are indexed. So I am able to find anything (if not encrypted). In particular I can retrieve all my used addresses.

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