Design Check

[dovecot at ptld.com]

> I think your approach would work, however, if I set
> up aliases similar to:
> 
> @barbaz.mydomain.com -> barbaz at mydomain.com.
> 
> I believe I can do that in postfix with some regex magic.

Yes, that would work perfectly without any regex.
You just point the catchall alias to the "user".
@barbaz.mydomain.com -> barbaz at mydomain.com



> one stumbling block could be that we don't
> know the various subdomains ahead of time.
> 
> The subdomain can be any value that the user
> wants, and we don't want them to have to
> precreate them before they can use an address

Best to my knowledge this is not possible with postfix. But ask the 
postfix mailing list to get a definitive answer. In postfix you have to 
tell it the domains it accepts mail for, anything else it considers 
relaying. Otherwise how does postfix know that email is meant to be 
saved here or it is just passing through and you want postfix to query 
DNS to find out where it goes (if relaying is even allowed).



> The purpose of the system is that users can create disposable/temporary 
> email addresses for various testing jobs.

Are you aware of postfix recipient_delimiter? It allows for disposable / 
wild card addresses. If enabled in postfix, you setup a mailbox user 
like barbaz at mydomain.com and any address with that user and the 
delimiter would still get delivered to that user.

    barbaz at mydomain.com -> barbaz at mydomain.com
    barbaz+randomtext at mydomain.com -> barbaz at mydomain.com
    barbaz+test1 at mydomain.com -> barbaz at mydomain.com

You can change the + to any symbol you want postfix to look out for.



> I think my "creating users" was me wanting to make sure that when 
> postfix
> passes an email for "barbaz at mydomain.com" to Dovecot, then Dovecot will 
> store it and wait for
> someone to come along and impersonate barbaz. i.e. "barbaz" doesn't 
> have to exist as a user
> already before Dovecot will store the mail.

If you are using LMTP dovecot will only accept emails from postfix that 
it can lookup the /directory/path to from one of the userdb{} or 
passdb{} sections. If dovecot can not find a match in any of the 
userdb{} or passdb{} it will reject the email as user unknown causing 
postfix to send a undeliverable notice email back to the envelope sender 
address, also known as back-scatter. I am not aware of a way to use 
wildcard addresses in dovecot userdb{}, i don't think its possible but i 
don't know what i don't know.