I am developing a site for which I would like to protect buyers by anonymizing their email addresses.Similar to craigslist's system, when a seller needs to contact a buyer they should be able to send an email to an anonymized address such as 1425415125@mysite.com which will then be routed to the user's email address.
My plan right now is to:
- Set up a bucket (catch-all) inbox
- Generate a random key for each buyer which will be the user specific ('1425415125' above) section of the email address
- Monitor the bucket inbox and parse out this user specific section. Once I know the user, the email can be forwarded to the correct address
My questions are as follows:
- Can you see any issues with the above solution
- Are there any open source solutions to the existing problem
- Are there any gotchas that one should be aware of when developing such a system?
Thanks in advance
JP