The idea of on-demand addresses is great. I operate my mail server since 2006 now and implemented such feature straight away. I started to never use the same mail address again. name-something@domain just forwards to the inbox of name. After a time I lost track about all the addresses I "generated".
But one thing was nice, I registered my mail with a hotline agent via phone. I told them my mail is name-$YOURCOMPANYNAME@domain. They replied, oh you are a colleague, then I can give you discount :)
How did you end up resolving the issue with too many generated emails addresses? I built and use my own domain inbox which buckets emails by email addresses (https://PretzelBox.cc) but more and more, I find myself using just one or two email addresses.
My way dealing with email has converged over the years to the following.
First, there two different kind of on-demand addresses.
1. Registration, these emails are stored in the password manager
2. Throw away, one time addresses
Second, I maintain a two mail folder method: inbox and archive. Sent mails are put into inbox, too. This makes mail threads a whole. From there they are either purged if spam or moved over to archive.
From here I can answer your question, how I manage all those generated addresses. The folders are indexed. So I am able to find anything (if not encrypted). In particular I can retrieve all my used addresses.
- Simple PHP web page for adding and listing existing aliases to/from a database. Adding a new alias has to be quick. Type in a description, and copy out the generated alias to clipboard for use elsewhere.
- Startup script that fetches the aliases from DB and modifies a mail client configuration so that all randomly generated addresses are annotated with a short descriptive text indicating to whom the address was issued and makes it so that replying sets the From header to the alias.
Actually, I do not actively generate, meaning create, a new addresses.
I use a filter I'm the delivery process in Exim which truncates a suffix from the local name.
But one thing was nice, I registered my mail with a hotline agent via phone. I told them my mail is name-$YOURCOMPANYNAME@domain. They replied, oh you are a colleague, then I can give you discount :)