I’d like to describe my position and I hope you’ll all empathise with me and tolerate my newbie questions. Perhaps other people on the internet will find any information you can give me very useful, because I’ve been having trouble finding the answers elsewhere…
I’ve been using Yahoo! mail for years and have now reached the point where I am determined to get away from them. I’m sure you’re aware that they concealed the fact that millions of user’s details were ‘hacked’. Then they scanned all of their user’s emails for a U.S. agency. Perhaps you’re also aware that they are now refusing to automatically forward emails! Reprehensible!
I’m currently thinking I’ll buy my own domain and run MiaB on a VPS (Ocean Digital?), but I need more information before I commit.
My favourite feature of Yahoo! mail was it’s disposable addresses whereby I could prepend a string to a root ‘word’ to create unique addresses, such as ‘santander-rootword@yahoomail.com’. If I gave this email address to Santander, and then started receiving spam emails about ‘f***buddies’ to my Santander address, I could just delete the disposable address. I would also suspect that Santander hadn’t been responsible with my contact details!
So, the first thing I’d like to clarify is to do with multiple email addresses and aliases. If I set up MiaB on a VPS, is there a limit to how many email addresses and aliases I could have with my own domain? I notice that some registrars have very tight limits on how many email addresses are allowed within their service structure. Is this only relevant if the registrar is hosting the email? I’m hoping that if I were to host my own email server I can have effectively unlimited email addresses or aliases. Is this correct? What are the limiting factors?
What’s the difference between aliases and email addresses? Is it all down to how messages are routed? I imagine that alias@example.com would be an alias if it were set to be forwarded to email@example.com, but it could also be a normal email address if it were setup to be standalone (with no forwarding)? Am I along the right lines here?
Finally (and thanks for bearing with me if you’ve read this far) if I set up lots of aliases, is it easy to send mail from the alias addresses such that the person receiving only sees the alias address?
I’m exceptionally new to all this and tried to get my head around this by Googling stuff, but I’m really struggling. I like the look of MiaB and would love to hear comments from some of the community…
Is this only relevant if the registrar is hosting the email? I’m hoping that if I were to host my own email server I can have effectively unlimited email addresses or aliases. Is this correct? What are the limiting factors?
To my knowledge there are no limits to how many addresses you can have for your domain that MIAB will handle mail for. You can freely add alias addresses to your domain from the administration GUI.
What’s the difference between aliases and email addresses? Is it all down to how messages are routed?
Every email address has to have a physical “mailbox” where the emails are delivered to. I think in this context that you are referring to, the email address is the physical mailbox where the mail will end up to (and it’s a real email address too), while aliases are attached to this mailbox and all emails that are sent to this alias email address will end up in the physical mailbox address.
You would also configure access to your email from your mail client using the credentials associated with the email address.
Finally (and thanks for bearing with me if you’ve read this far) if I set up lots of aliases, is it easy to send mail from the alias addresses such that the person receiving only sees the alias address?
When configuring the alias address in the administration panel, you would have to choose as the “Permitted sender” the option “I’ll enter the mail users that can send mail claiming to be from the alias address” and give the email address of the physical box as the sender for the alias and you can send email in the name of the alias.
Thank you ever so much for your time and effort. Your answers are very helpful. I’m intending to implement MiaB as soon as I get some spare time. I may come back and let you know how I got on. It seems relatively straight forward, but I expect I’ll get a few snags because I’m not all that computer literate. Thanks again!
My favourite feature of Yahoo! mail was it’s disposable addresses
MiaB supports ±suffixes for throwaway addresses. you+anything@example.com
(One day I’d really like to have wildcard aliases, where the alias matches if just the prefix matches. No need for the +. It seems like it shouldn’t be too hard but I haven’t tried to make it work yet…)
Yes, good point. But I guess the original intention was to have a throwaway address that wouldn’t deliver the address anymore after it being discarded. AFAIK you can put anything after the + character and it still will be delivered to the mailbox. And there’s no way to prevent such an address from functioning on MiaB side. On the mail client side you can of course set a filter that will delete the emails coming to a specific “+ email address”.
MiaB actually supports server-side filters, and they work fine with ±addresses. You can blackhole, bounce, or robo-reply in response to any throwaway address… Seems like it should give you everything you had before.
I’m a complete novice at this and I’ve managed to set up my own domain, get MiaB up and running and send/receive emails without any major trouble. I’m very happy and satisfied with the result.
This is actually very useful. It was a comment in the Miab control panel which made me realise the practical advantages:
Use this as a fast way to segment incoming mail for your own filtering rules without having to create aliases in this control panel.
Thanks @kypeli and @bronson - I’m so pleased with what you’ve helped me achieve. The functionality I can create with a combination of various email addresses, aliases and +tag addresses is all I’d hoped for.
Goodbye Yahoo!, hello MiaB and it’s very helpful community!
