Ask HN: How to proxify emails?

2 points·whoshallsucceed··4 comments

I'm running a store platform for which buyers coordinates are sensitive. In order to prevent sellers to store the buyers coordinates to be independent, I am looking for ways to alias phone numbers and emails.

So far, I've found Twilio which seems great for SMS and Call with Virtual Phone Numbers.

But I can't find a similar way for emails. Is there any I missed?

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For email forwarding, you can have a look at https://github.com/danisola/forward-cat. However, I do not know if this would work for your setup. On top of that, I do not think it handles replies to the email alias, but I am not sure.

What could work is to just use an internal system for messaging, so that each of your users has a private inbox in your store platform. Kind of like direct messaging in a forum...

Thanks for following up but they lack an API which is mandatory for my needs.

you can use mailgun for that. it has an api and concepts of "routes". you will be able to intercept email from seller@seller_domain.com to buyer@your_domain.com, handle it in your app (mailgun will POST to your web app), and then send from seller@your_domain.com to buyer@buyer_domain.com. really transparent. you can tweak any part of the workflow. have all conversations and all stats in your app.

Yes, I found out after a while. I ended up doing just that. Last thing to figure out is how to send the mail as is, meaning for now I pick the HMTL part and send it setting the content type. But this way lacks the Text version of the email.

I'll keep digging up.

Thanks for following up!

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