Question

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 [e-mail] which would then forward the email to [e-mail].

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 patterns, servers, 3rd party services, or libraries that provide such a feature? Does anyone have any suggestions for how this could be built?

Answer 1

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.