New feature (paid): wide-open addresses

Posted in Blog. Written by J Lane on October 6th, 2009

A new feature went live today: the ability to create wide-open addresses in Mailmanagr.  These addresses will bypass the “authorized senders” list on the account, and will let anyone send a message into Basecamp using that address.

Why on earth would you want to do that?

Some folks have asked for the ability so that they can use Basecamp to handle requests from their customers and web sites.  There are cases where it’s impossible to know where all of your mail is going to come from, or the potential authorized senders list is just too big, this new feature will let you work around that.

Just bear in mind that you might receive proposals from Nigerian political officials in your Basecamp projects.  You’ve been warned.

So, with this announcement comes a couple of notes:

1. We don’t filter spam.  If you create an open address in Mailmanagr, and post it on a public web site, expect to get junk mail.  If you’re concerned about who can add content to your Basecamp projects, this feature probably isn’t for you.
2. This is a paid-account-only feature.  Sorry.  We try to look at features in terms of the resources needed to support them.  This could generate significantly more traffic to our mail servers.
3. If things go absolutely insane, and the mail volume spikes to a crazy level, we might have to rein things in on an account-by-account basis.  We’re not going to be prudish about it, but please think twice before doing something that is going to result in thousands of messages per minute.

So here’s a few tips, if you’re considering using this new feature, but you aren’t sure about how to keep things somewhat secure.  They aren’t requirements, but they are ideas you might want to consider:

1. If you’re going to post one of these addresses for customers to use, do it on a client portal; somewhere that is password-protected.
2. Build a contact form for your web site, and have that send the message through Mailmanagr, instead of posting the address out in the open.
3. Make the addresses hard to guess.
4. Feel free to change your addresses up on occasion if you do start receiving spam.

With that, enjoy!  As always, we’d love to hear from you about any ideas, problems or concerns you might have.