December 29, 2004

Useful tools: the catch all email address

When working on a web application that requires authentication, email address is often chosen as a username. It's guaranteed to be unique, it's something that the user knows rather than another username they have to remember, and communication to the user is built in--if they're having trouble, just have send them an email.

However, when developing the initial registration portion of a site that depends on email address for the username, you often run through many email addresses as you tackle development and bugs. Now, it is certainly easy enough to get more email addresses through Yahoo or hotmail. But that's a tedious process, and you're probably violating their terms of service.

Two other alternatives arise: you can delete the emails you want to reuse from the web application's database. This is unsavory for a number of reasons. One is that mucking around in a database when you're in the middle of testing registration is likely to distract you. Of course, if you have a the deletes scripted, it's less of an issue. You'll need to spend some time ensuring you've reset the state back to a true pure place; I've spent time debugging issues that arose for anomalous user state that could never be achieved without access to the back end.

Which is why I favor the other option. If you own your own domain name and have the catch all key set, all email for your domain that does not have a specified user goes to the catch all account. (I wasn't able to find out much of hose this is set up, other than this offhanded reference to the /etc/mail/virtusertable file.)

I find having this available tremendously useful. You have an infinite number (well, perhaps not infinite, but very large) of addresses to throw away. At times, the hardest part is remembering which address I actually used, which is why having a system of some kind is useful. For example, for my dev database on my current project, I start all users with foo and then a number. For the stage database, I start all users with bar and then a number.

In addition to helping with development, it's useful to have these throwaway email addresses when you are signing up for other web applications or posting on the web. For example, my jaas@mooreds.com account, which was posted on my JAAS and Struts paper, is hopelessly spammed. If I had put my real address on that paper, I would have much more spam than I do now, as jaas@mooreds.com simply goes to /dev/null courtesy of procmail. I've also used distinctive email addresses for blog comments and for subscribing to various mailling lists; this way I can find out if everyone really keeps their data as private as they say they will. Of course, there are free services out there that let you have throwaway email addresses but having your own domain gives you a bit more security and longevity.

All in all, I find that having a catch all email address set up for a given domain is a very useful development tool, as well as a useful general web browsing technique.

Posted by moore at December 29, 2004 08:46 PM
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