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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

I've long wanted a service where every address is routed as a virtual folder as part of one shared domain level inbox for my personal domain. So I don't have to +alias so much or put up with the blocks some sites have on +aliases. E.g. if I shop at Safeway, I can give them <safeway@mydomain.example>, if I log in with Google, I can make the Google account <google@mydomain.example>, etc. Then I want the ability to create labels for actively used inboxes, for example if I have a Costco account, <costco@mydomain.example>, I could give it ans the Safeway email a shopping tag and have that is a secondary inbox, i.e. a hierarchy like <all mail>, then grouped boxes like <shopping>, then select individual inboxes, and finally a catchall inbox for any other inboxes.

I kind of have Google setup this way, but it's a friggin pain (and not really advised) to keep adding address aliases, or having to fight to +alias stuff. So it doesn't quite work.

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Fastmail lets you do safeway@glyptodon.mydomain.example as an alternative to plus-aliases.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

With some tinkering you can also route arbitrary addresses to plus-aliases (@example.com -> inbox+@example.com, where "inbox@example.com" would be your "main" address). This correctly sorts incoming mail into folders just like normal plus-alias usage would (if those folders exist), but in your inbox, the mail will still show the original mail-to (*@example.com, not the plus-alias version), and when replying, it'll use the correct address (not the plus-alias).

Support helped a lot when I tried to set this up. They initially said it wasn't possible, then came back a while later with a correction.

So close but so far... The subdomain aliasing is neat, but it looks like you still have to create folders manually and also manually configure anything you use as a sending address at the point that you need it.

I’ve been using Fastmail for years and all my accounts use unique email addresses like safeway@example.com through the catch-all option.

It takes a bit of time to set everything up the way you want at first, but Fastmail supports custom sieve scripts. With wildcards in sieve, you can automatically create and apply labels to these kinds of per-account addresses without naming them all in advance. You can add specific ones to get additional labels like Shopping or Travel too.

Fastmail’s catch-all implementation doesn’t force you to manually create the named alias in order to send either, i.e., on the rare occasion you need to reply from an account email address, the from address uses the address it was sent to. This feature only works on Fastmail’s apps or the website, not with 3rd party clients. I still use Apple Mail most of the time, but can easily switch to the app real quick when I have to reply from a catch-all address. Regular named aliases can be created and added to Apple Mail without issue though.

Pretty much every other option I looked into supported catch-all aliases too, but required you to manually setup the alias before you could send from it. That’s such a pain in the ass.

I don't have the grouped boxes but I use a sieve filter on my ISPs mailserver to automatically create folders based on prefix@mydomain.example

Here is my script:

require ["fileinto","imap4flags","variables","regex","mailbox"];

## A catch all filter designed to automatically organise emails sent to a catch-all address into a folder based on the receiving address e.g amazon@example.com --> INBOX.Amazon ## If the folder doesn't exist it is automatically created

if exists "X-Delivered-To" { if header :regex "X-Delivered-To" "([^@]+)" { set :upperfirst "prefix" "${1}"; fileinto :create "INBOX.${prefix}"; stop; } }

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