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forwardmail.pl - Email Forwarder and Anonymizer Script
Add anonymous email services to your website
Ever felt the need to provide anonymous e-mail services for your website? There
are several reasons you could have a need for something like this:
- You run a site that allows users to advertise goods for sale. For privacy
reasons, you don't want to display the seller's e-mail address. People who
want to contact a seller send email to anon-XXX@yourdomain.com and the emails
get forwarded to the seller's real e-mail address
- You run an email-forwarding service, where registered users get an anonymous
email address (such as my-email-XXXX@yourdomain.com) and emails sent to
this address automatically get forwarded to the real address.
If you do something like this, then this script is exactly what you're looking
for. Best of all, it is released with full source and a very permissive license
that allows you to make your own modifications if you like.
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System Requirements
You'll need the following:
- UNIX-like system - Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. The code can be easily modified
to work on Windows. Contact author for details.
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- perl
- perl modules - DBI, Net::POP3, Email::MIME, Mail::Sendmail.
- Some kind of database to store the real email addresses. MySQL or Postgres are suggested, but practically anything else can be used as well.
- Access to set up a cronjob and a default email address.
- POP email + some editing skills
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Setup Instructions
Please follow the steps below:
- Set up a separate catch-all e-mail account for your domain
- Download the code and unzip it.
- Modify the script according to your server and login details
- Upload the script to your server
- Set up a cron job to run your script every few minutes or so
- Profit!
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How the Script Works
The script works as follows:
- First check to make sure that another copy of the script is not already running
- Log into the POP mail box using the specified login and password and fetch
all the emails from the box.
- For each email, check the To: address.
- If the To: address begins with
anon-XXXX@ (where XXXX is a number), it extracts XXXX from the address
and queries the database for the real e-mail address. It then forwards
the email on to the real address. If you want to use a different prefix address
instead of anon-XXXX@ (for instance, fakemail-XXXX@ or mymail-XXX@), you can
easily modify the script to do this.
- If the To: address doesn't begin with anon-XXXX@, it forwards the email to
another default address. You can change this default address in the script
as well. Typically, this should go to a regular email address that the
owner of the website uses.
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Copyright © 2004 Mayukh Bose. All rights reserved.
This work may be freely reproduced provided this copyright notice is preserved.
OPTIONAL: Please consider linking to this website (
http://www.mayukhbose.com/) as well.