trualias

Copyright (c) 2019-2023 Fred Morris, Tacoma WA. Apache 2.0 license.

Trualias is a postfix tcp table that lets you hand out your email address to anyone and everyone but add a bit of math to protect yourself while doing so.

These days every vendor, grocery store, and app wants to register you with an email address so they can offer better service (and track you). Most people either use their primary address which eventually gets flooded or create a second email account which they use for "commercial" purposes. Trualias is a more sophisticated way to create aliases as an alternative to wildcarding an entire domain which also lets you conveniently track the trackers!

Creating aliases or accounts every time you need to register for something or give out your email is a lot of work and annoying. This is why Trualias lets you make up a "new" email address (alias) on the fly. Wildcarding a domain means you receive every single email sent to the domain and there's no easy way to determine whether or not you handed out a particular alias or not. We need a bit more error correction to make that determination. What's the error checking? An easy, mentally-calculable checksum to add at the end of the alias.

Postfix tcp tables

This utility is implemented as a TCP table service for both local aliases (tcp_table_server) and virtual aliases (tcp_virtual_server). Except for some rudimentary configuration settings (for network interface/address, port and logging level) and service startup there is nothing else to set up beside the specifics of your particular encoding scheme (in a file trualias.conf in the same directory as the script).

Inside of main.cf the only thing you need to do in a vanilla installation is add the service to virtual_alias_maps (assuming that the service is configured to listen on loopback port 3047):

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual tcp:127.0.0.1:3047

The domains with aliases being mapped do not need to be listed in virtual_alias_domains. Look in the install/ and python/ directories for further information about installation and setup.

You will want to use tcp_virtual_server rather than tcp_table_server because current policy of the Postfix team decrees TCP tables to be a security risk when looking up aliases for local accounts.

Milter server (DEPRECATED)

NOTE: In November 2022 tcp_table_server.py (and by implication tcp_virtual_server.py) were updated to be compatible with Python 3.11. The milter server has not been updated and there are no current plans to do so.

There is also a milter implementation. It doesn't get as much love, because quite frankly I have no concerns or difficulties recompiling and replacing local(8) and the TCP table solution works perfectly with Postfix local_recipient_maps and rejects recipients during the SMTP RCPT exchange.

Postfix has some issues with milters. For starters, although the milter protocol supports rejecting recipients during SMTP RCPT, it doesn't support rewriting them until EOB (end of message). In reality the milter protocol is capable of fast-forwarding in the case of envelope-only operations and by fast-forwarding recipient rewriting could occur during SMTP RCPT, but it doesn't get implemented that way.

Partly as a consequence of this, local_recipient_maps cannot be utilized. They're processed first and the milter implementation makes it impossible (pointless) to process them afterwards. Because local_recipient_maps is not a viable option, the milter makes use of SMTP VRFY to validate local delivery which has its own issues. See install/MILTER_README.md for futher details regarding configuring the milter server with Postfix. The code has been written with replacing VRFY with some other source of local account / identity truth in mind.

Some examples

See Grammar.md for the syntax specification.

Let's start with an account named foo, and define an alias pattern for foo-macys-m5:

• append the company name
• compute a checksum (more correctly a verification code) which concatenates the first letter of the company name with the number of letters in it.

ACCOUNT foo
MATCHES "%account%-%alnum%-%code%
WITH CHAR(1,1,-), CHARS()

Maybe we don't want to reflect our actual account foo, and want to set up a traditionally-purposed alias joe, so that joe-macys-m5 gets delivered to foo:

ACCOUNT foo
ALIASED joe
MATCHES "%alias%-%alnum%-%code%
WITH CHAR(1,1,-), CHARS()

You will quickly discover that you're not allowed to put certain things right next to each other, because they will be rejected as semantically ambiguous, for instance %alpha%%alpha% is not allowed. But you can use literals to separate them, for instance %alpha%is%alpha% as in the following rule, which will match samissexy.34:

ACCOUNT baz
MATCHES %alpha%is%alpha%.%code%
WITH CHARS(1), CHARS(2);

This also demonstrates resolution to an account for which neither an account or alias is specified.

Let's be honest, this is broken crypto for a broken internet. Nobody is doing SHA or MD5 in their head. But this is policy, not security: in other words we don't need to verifiably block every single bogus email forever, we just need to make the miscreant's jobs difficult enough that they move on to softer targets. Different people have different levels of mental facility with number and word games; some people have none at all (sorry, this may not be the tool for you). Part of the strength of this scheme is that everyone gets to choose a somewhat different format.

We make it easy to tailor the format of the alias and to compute a checkum which works for you:

Identifiers are used to select text to compute values on:

• alnum Alphanumeric characters. (Used in our examples above.)
• alpha Alphabetic characters.
• number Numerals.
• fqdn A domain name (alphanumeric, "-", ".").
• ident An "identifier" (alphanumeric, "-","_").

Functions are used to calculate parts of the checksum from identifiers:

• DIGITS() Count of digits.
• ALPHAS() Count of alphabetic characters.
• LABELS() Count of labels in an domain name.
• CHARS() Count of characters.
• VOWELS() Count of vowels.
• ANY() Any character in an identifier.
• NONE() Any character not in an identifier.
• CHAR() The character at a certain position in an identifier.