Handle wildcard aliases
What is a wildcard alias ?
A wildcard alias is an alias containing an asterisk *
as a placeholder for "anything unspecified". For example, if I have an alias gitlab*@example.org
pointing to john@example.org
, any incoming email matching this pattern will be redirected to john, such as gitlabispconfig@example.org
or gitlab-support@example.org
Obiviously, wildcard aliases should not intercept direct aliases nor inbox emails, and catchall should still capture anything that does not match any (wildcard or not) alias.
Apart from this, wildcard aliases allows to give a unique email to each service you suscribe to in order to either filter incoming mail easily based on the From:
address, or, when you start receiving spam, know who the hell sold your address (and denylist this specific address)
How is it different from + aliasing ?
Using +
as a separator has some issues :
- Some systems (website or otherwise) still don't recognize the
+
character as valid in an email, so bye bye filtering. - Some systems (I encountered at least 1 so far) allow the
+
in the submission process but removes it entirely. So bye bye filtering (again)
Wildcard aliases can use only "regular" characters. In fact, there is no way to know if a given adress is an alias or not, wether this alias is wildcarding or not.
What should be done in ISPconfig to make this available ?
From the webUI we can submit wildcard aliases (aliases having an asterisk * in part of the name) but they don't work as intended (not at all actually).
Having them to work is only a matter of editing the /etc/postfix/mysql-virtual_forwardings.cf
file to lookup for wildcard characters.
I've already done the development require and will push a MR with this.