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9tontruck 0 Newbie Poster

Hi,

I have a domain and DigitalOcean cloud ubuntu server, and I have been using the server as an email forwarding point. SImply, if someone sends an email to info@domain.com, the server forwards to personal@gmail.com. The beauty of this is that I don't need to spend my server space used up for saving email and I can still use gmail UI. Downside is I have to reply using gmail account.

So I wanted to send an email using my domain email from gmail website. Custom domain email hosting in Google and Hotmail is not free so please don't mention it.

So I am looking for a way to smart email piping system and here is what it supposed to do:

customer -> server -> I
customer <- server <- I

**When customer sends an email**
from: customer@hotmail.com
to: info@domain.com


**When server forwards to me**
from: info-customer-hotmail.com@domain.com
to: personal@gmail.com


**when I reply**
from: personal@gmail.com
to: info-customer-hotmail.com@domain.com


**When the server forward to the customer**
from: info@domain.com
to: customer@hotmail.com

Basically it's free custom domain email hosting that allows using Gmail environment.

Is there any library doing this kind of things?

Thanks,

Edited by 9tontruck
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Dani AI

Generated

This is exactly the pattern you described: per-sender (on‑the‑fly) aliases that forward inbound mail to your inbox and route replies back using a unique reply address. Two practical paths:

  • Use an existing open‑source alias/forwarding project (saves a lot of work). Self‑hostable projects that implement per‑sender aliases, reply routing and admin UIs include SimpleLogin, AnonAddy and ForwardEmail — each can be run on a VPS and do the heavy lifting for you. (github.com)

  • DIY with Postfix + a tiny app: accept mail for info@yourdomain and use Postfix’s pipe/transport to hand each incoming message to a small script. The script:

    1. creates a stable token for the original sender (store mapping token -> sender in a DB),
    2. rewrites the forwarded message’s recipient/from to an alias derived from that token so replies come back to your script, and
    3. forwards the modified message to your Gmail. Postfix supports piping deliveries to a program for exactly this use. (postfix.org)

Example workflow (pseudocode):

on_receive(mail):
  token = HMAC(sender + now)[:12]
  store(token -> sender)
  alias = "info+" + token + "@domain.tld"
  rewrite_recipient_and_from(mail, to=your@gmail, from=alias)
  send(mail)
on_reply(mail_to_alias):
  token = extract_token(mail_to_alias)
  dest = lookup(token)
  forward_as_domain_from(mail, to=dest)   # send via your server SMTP

If you only need to send as info@domain.com (not per-sender aliasing), the simplest route is Gmail’s “Send mail as” using your domain SMTP — you can reply from Gmail but have outbound mail go through your server so SPF/DKIM align. ()

Cautions: handle SPF/DKIM/DMARC (sign outgoing mail and include your server in SPF), think about attachments, threading headers, bounce handling and rate limits, and protect the token->recipient store. For most people starting with SimpleLogin/AnonAddy/ForwardEmail is far faster than building everything yourself.

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