I'm building an open-source email forwarding service

Hi everyone,

This is my first ever post on Indie Hackers so go easy on me!

For the past few months I have been working on an open-source anonymous email forwarding service called AnonAddy (short for anonymous email address).

It works in a similar fashion to 33mail. When you register, you choose a username, and you can then use *@username.anonaddy.com (or .me) as your email aliases. You can also generate UUID email aliases.

The site is built using Laravel for the backend, with Vue.js and Tailwindcss on the frontend.

I followed a TDD (test driven development) approach when building the site as recommended and taught by Adam Wathan. Having lots of tests definitely gives you confidence when making refactoring changes down the line.

At first there were many occasions when I found myself paralyzed by indecision since I knew the code would be visible and I didn't want to make any public mistakes. After a while I got over this fear as I realised even the best of us still make mistakes.

You can find the source code and FAQs here on GitHub also mirrored on GitLab.

The server is running Postfix as the MTA (mail transfer agent) and does not send emails through any third-party, it simply pipes newly received emails to the Laravel application.

I ran an open beta for a couple of months or so to gather user feedback which was extremely useful and helped shape some of the new features I've added.

To find some initial users for the beta I made a couple posts on /r/privacy and /r/PrivacyToolsIO.

Current features:

• Create unlimited aliases on the fly
• Bring your own GPG/OpenPGP key to encrypt your forwarded emails (and the option to replace subjects)
• Browser extension (also open-source) for Firefox and Chrome for generating UUID aliases
• Reply to forwarded emails anonymously
• Deactivate/Delete aliases if they start to receive spam
• Multiple recipients per alias
• Add custom domains
• Ability to generate UUID aliases
• Ability to add additional usernames to compartmentalise aliases
• API (work in progress)
• No ads, trackers or analytics

Future features:

• More API routes and documentation
• Additional features for the browser extension to manage aliases
• HaveIBeenpwned.com integration to check if aliases have been involved in any data breaches

You can visit the site here - anonaddy.com

Any questions, suggestions or feedback is very welcome.

Thanks,
Will