Design Check

[Felix Ingram]

Hello all,

I'm building a mail system and would like to check whether my design is
feasible. I'm fairly certain that it is but I think I don't have the right
words and concepts lined up properly in my head.

The end system will provide temporary/disposable email addresses that can
be accessed by multiple people.

People would be able to send email to addresses that match the following
format:

user1 at foobar.mydomain.com
user2 at foobar.mydomain.com

user1 at barbaz.mydomain.com
user2 at barbaz.mydomain.com

I would like all emails to the "foobar" subdomain to end up in their own
mailbox and all emails to the "barbaz" subdomain to go to their own
mailbox. (I think that means I need a foobar and barbaz user on Dovecot).
Users of the system should be able to see all of the emails, including the
original addresses they were sent to.

e.g. user1 at foobar.mydomain.com and user2 at foobar.mydomain.com both get
delivered to the "foobar" mailbox, and users can see all emails, including
that they were sent to "user1" and "user2"

The users of the system would be able to access any of the foobar, barbaz,
etc mailboxes - I believe that means that they would need to be set as
master users.

I will be creating a web interface for users to get/set their credentials,
so can add those users on an adhoc basis, but I will need to have the
"foobar", "barbaz", etc users created whenever an email arrives (we won't
know ahead of time).

The plan is to have postfix accepting the emails before passing them to
Dovecot. I don't believe postfix needs to do much processing but that this
would be the place to transform the address into the correct user/mailbox
name.

So my questions are:

1. Does the above sound reasonable?
2. Can Dovecot auto-create users as needed?
3. Will I be able to preserve the original email?
4. Are master users the right approach?

There is no strong requirement for privacy between mailboxes - there is no
issue with one user being able to read all email.
There is also no requirement to be able to send email but that is a feature
request for the future - we would want people to be able to send as the
original address when that's implemented.

Any pointers gratefully received.

Thanks in advance,

Felix
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