Hey,

I have several thousand email addresses, the vast majority of which are definitely no good, and I want to figure out which are good.

So I will send out an email to all the email addresses. By making a list of the ones that bounced, and comparing that list with the full list, I can determine which are still good.

This is for a non-profit association -- I am not in the spam business.

Knowing exactly which emails bounced would be much easier if I could set up an in box implementing VERP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path

In other words, I want an in box accepting all mail where the email addresses match a wildcard pattern like this: mail_admin_??????@domain.org, where ?????? are 6 digits. The digits would be a scrambled contact ID. Since they will be digits only, here is the regular expression: mail_admin_\d{6}. (We will pick a wildcard pattern that does not conflict with any existing address on the server.)

Sending the outgoing emails, each with a different "From" address matching the wildcard pattern, is not a problem -- I have a working python script for this.

The challenge is getting one in box to accept emails with different "From" addresses (matching the wildcard pattern).

We are running IMAP server Dovecot 1.0.7.

How do I set this up in the IMAP server to accept emails to addresses matching the wildcard pattern?

Thanks,

Rick Graves