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Thread: craigslist.com like email relay

  1. #1
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    Member damien's Avatar
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    craigslist.com like email relay

    Came across this not long ago and it's a ripper idea. I'm hoping a future version can do something with the emails and make it totally anonymous from point to point, same as craigslist emails.

    A strategy for hiding the sender's
    email address from the recipient. A database would be a good method
    to do this, just use an alias or generate a large random character
    string and replace the sender's email with it:

    you receive:

    From: dontseeme@privateplace.com
    To: somedude@somedomain.com
    Subject: Test Message

    generate and put something like this in your database...

    biglongstringofnonsense = dontseeme@privateplace.com

    and the outgoing mail will look like...

    From: biglongstringofnonsense@mlfolk.com <-- replace mlfolk.com with
    To: somedude@somedomain.com your domain name
    Subject: Test Message

    When the reply comes back as...

    From: somedude@somedomain.com
    To: biglongstringofnonsense@mlfolk.com
    Subject: Re: Test Message - hello

    you look up "biglongstringofnonsense" in the database and then return to sender

    From: somedude@somedomain.com
    To: dontseeme@privateplace.com
    Subject: Re: Test Message - hello

    =================================================

    If you use a random string, use large (~20 characters) nonsequential
    strings. Keep in mind email addresses are not case-sensitive, so only
    use upper or lowercase letters. Log any invalid addresses so you can
    debug, resolve and track hacking.

    If, however, you want to avoid a database implementation, you'll need
    to use a strong two-way encryption algorithm (i.e. not a hash). I'd
    use AES since it's in the public domain and included in the .Net
    classes. Just salt and encrypt the sender's email like this:

    sender: dontseeme@privateplace.com
    add salt to get: !@#$dontseeme@privateplace.com
    now encrypt to get: biglongstringofnonsense
    send email from: biglongstringofnonsense@mlfolk.com

    [ ... some time passes... ]

    email comes back addressed to: biglongstringofnonsense@mlfolk.com
    strip off domain to get: biglongstringofnonsense
    decrypt to get: !@#$dontseeme@privateplace.com
    remove salt to get sender: dontseeme@privateplace.com


    =================================================

    The database method is nice because you can use an alias in place of
    the sender's identity. That way the recipient knows who he is talking
    to but just doesn't see the email address. This is common in online
    chat forums and dating sites. The encryption method is nice because
    it requires very few resources and is not prone to failure should the
    database become unavailable.

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    Rookie jordan's Avatar
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    Re: craigslist.com like email relay

    Did you ever develop (find) a solution for anonymous communications between buyers/sellers? I'm interested as well.

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    Founder dcowgill's Avatar
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    Re: craigslist.com like email relay

    Building something like that would take a lot of work and require your own (or full control) of an email server. Yes, the idea would be to create a mapping of temp email address to perm email address but each time you'd have to intercept the mail request, do the lookup, and then reroute it to the perm email address.

    As cool as this sounds, it's not something ClassiPress will be doing since almost all CP customers don't have their own email server.

    One solution I just though of would be having each of your CP users create a temp email address by using a service like http://www.guerrillamail.com or another temporary email account. Then they use that as their contact profile email address which accomplishes the same thing.

  4. #4
    Thread Starter
    Member damien's Avatar
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    Re: craigslist.com like email relay

    Oh well, it sounded good at the time but yeah I just assumed you could pass it off to the database and run it via a plugin for sending emails or something. I understand what you mean too, fair enough we could send the emails out, but when the user replies to the nonsense looking email from my domain it has to come back to my website server, be processed and shipped out again. It's not something wordpress and classipress can handle alone.

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