Dynamic Email Forwarders

I am trying to create a site that will facilitate transactions between a buyer and a seller who need to remain anonymous from each other until the right time. One thought I had was to be able to create dynamic email forwarders, where each forwarding aliases would be an ID number associated to the recipient. In this way, people can email [email protected] and it would be forwarded to [email protected], for example. By having it be dynamic, I can add and delete these as needed.

I contacted discountASP.net and they say that they do not support this feature. Can anyone think of a way to do something like this? Does anyone have another creative solution to allow the 2 parties to be in contact with each other anonymously, besides by creating a place on the website? I'm concerned about maintenance issues and storage issues if I did it through the site. People would not want to have to attach documents over and over again for each time they needed to send an email.

Also, does anyone know if we can create any kind of triggers to be invoked upon the receipt of a message? There can also be that possibility, I guess, using the catch all mailbox feature. Lastly, it is possible that I may need to use a different email provider. Know any good ones for things like this?

 

You have a few possibilites. You can wait for our API to come out (in a few weeks), which will allow you to create/destroy email boxes with your code.

Or you can use the catch all account to store all the messages. You can create a service that would POLL the catch all account and re-route the emails to their proper destination.


Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Thank you for the reply. I had thought of this as an option, too, but was concerned that it would require me to actually keep a copy of the messages in a mailbox, even if only for a few minutes between batch runs. That runs the risk of filling up my quotas with large attachments. Also, I would not think it to be a good use of processing power to be polling from my website just to send emails. This is a feature that is natively supported by email servers themselves.


I look forward to hearing about the new API. Please let me know once it becomes available. I hope that it allows me to add and remove forwarding/alias names, in addition to regular mailboxes.


One other thought I had would be is itpossible (I know some products, such as IMail support this) to have the mail server kickoff (trigger) a process/URL upon receipt of a message? This may avoid polling. I know polling sounds like a minor use or resources, but as a website grows, every little bit helps. It's also helpful to others whom may share the same server. I am already planning to have some batch processing using the scheduler for other things.
Thanks!

Stacey

 

You should have enough space to store the emails. You have 500 megs of storage. You could also POLL as frequent as ever 1 minute.


Yes, with the new API you will be able to create all types of accounts. Should be available shortly.


IMail might be another option. We don't run it here, but you can run your own mail server and setup all the triggers you need.


Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Thanks. Can you please post a reply to this when the new API is available with info on it?


Appreciated!

 

if I remember I will


Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Is this API available yet? It's been a few weeks.

jdc

 

This is very good news. Thank you for the reply. I have searched the kb and the community for topics such as email, forward, auto, and a few others. I cannot seem to find any documentation on this API. Can someone point me in the right direction on how it works?

Thanks!