Is it possible to use 2-way email relay on GAE?

Question

I have a web application running on google appengine which sends emails to users, giving them an another users email address so that they can contact each other. I would like to hide the real email addresses using a temporary one so the real email addresses remain private. Similar to the way that is done on craiglist when you send an email to an ad. Is there way to achieve this on appengine? I'm using javax.mail. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use AppEngine to both send and receive emails. So you can receive emails and re-send them to different addresses hiding the original address. Of course there are restrictions.

Official docs for sending emails: Using JavaMail to Send Mail

Official docs for receiving email: Receiving Email

To send emails the sender address must be one of the following types:

• The address of a registered administrator for the application
• The address of the user for the current request signed in with a Google Account. You can determine the current user's email address with the Users API. The user's account must be a Gmail account, or be on a domain managed by Google Apps.
• Any valid email receiving address for the app (such as [email protected]).

Your app can receive email at addresses of the following form:

[email protected]

Email messages are sent to your app as HTTP POST requests using the following URL:

/_ah/mail/<address>

where address is a full email address, including domain name. To handle incoming email in your app, you have to map email URLs to servlets in the web.xml file.