Use your own address - June 13, 2008 -

admin | development, features, tips & tricks

As we near our one millionth user (heh, just kidding, wanted to make sure that you’re paying attention!) it may become increasingly difficult to find e-mail addresses that you like. I addressed this question before, by asking for feedback on whether I should assign addresses, or let people pick whatever they like. I opted to stick with letting you all decide.

Early on, I had a couple of users ask me if they could setup e-mail addresses on their own domains, and set them to forward to Mailmanagr addresses. I thought that sounded like a great idea, and told them to go ahead… only, it didn’t work.

Explanation

Mailmanagr’s got a two-part security system. For starters, it checks the to: and cc: fields of an e-mail against the addresses in the system. If that address doesn’t exist, it bounces the message (we can’t deliver messages to unknown addresses afterall!). The second part is that it checks the from: field against the list of allowed senders for a particular address. Assuming everything is happy, we’re off to the races.

I expected that the problem with forwarding addresses was actually a function of security step number 2 — the from address was getting altered when the message is forwarded. Turns out I was wrong, it’s actually security step number 1. When a message is forwarded (at least on the mail servers I tested), the to: or cc: addresses are left untouched. So if I had sent a message to myproject@industryinteractive.net and that address actually forwards to myproject@mailmanagr.com, the to: field will still have the @industryinteractive.net address in it.

Success!

Just to give the post a point, I’m happy to report that as of today, setting up server-side forwarding of addresses *should* work. Now, I’m throwing in a “should” there because goodness knows I haven’t tested against every mail server in the world, just those available to me. If this is a feature that’s of interest to you though, give it a try. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, fire me off a message at info@industryinteractive.net and let me know what mail server you’re using (if you know). If you don’t know, just send me a message anyhow, so that I’m aware that it’s not working universally.

Huh?

If you’ve read this far, and you’re wondering why the heck anyone would care to do this, a couple of things come to mind:

1. Customer support: You could set the “support@yourdomain.com” address to forward to a Mailmanagr address that’s pointing to either a Customer Support project, or a customer support category within a project.
2. You’ve given up on trying to get certain clients to actually use Basecamp. Try as you might, they just keep e-mailing you. Why not just have them e-mail it right into your Basecamp project?
3. Prestige, fame, glory: you can just start setting up various employee names @yourdomain.com and then when you communicate with clients, let them know that you’re “CCing” Ted or Sue or Derek in on the conversation (you know, to keep them in the loop).

Have your own reason, or a tip about how you’re using Mailmanagr? We’d love to hear about it.