I'm currently testing some complicated functionality in a web app that involves multiple accounts within the app; each with its own unique email address. I have a few temp gmail accounts that I'm using for this purpose, but keep having to update email addresses in the database to something else for some accounts in order to reuse email addresses. It gets meesy very quickly.
My question is; is there a way I can setup an email server on my VPS (Ubuntu 16.04) that is able to accept all email addresses on a given domain without me having to define each one in advance? Ie; I'd like to be able to make up email addresses as I go; test1@mydomain.com, test2@mydomain.com, etc, and have the server receive AND store any incoming emails to those addresses. Emails include account verifications, notifications, etc, and I need to know what is being sent to each participant at each point in each workflow as I test.
Ideally I'd like some way to view all of these emails on the domain regardless of address. Perhaps setting up an alias using some kind of wildcard so that all incoming email go to a single address that I can configure in my email client on my dev machine.
After a lot of research and messing about with different configurations, I found the best solution for me was PostFix with Dovecot.
I was able to set up virtual mailboxes in PostFix with virtual_mailbox_maps pointing to a file that contained this; @mydomain.com mydomain.com/catchall/
This allows mail to any email address within the domain to go to one mailbox. The mydomain.com/catchall/ is a location on the server where the mailbox is located. By convention, the domain is used in the path. Useful if you are hosting email on multiple domains. Dovecot supports variables in the config which allows you to point it to the correct mailbox.
I also found that the PostFix main.cf file must have mydestination = localhost for this configuration to work.
the following posts helped me getting this up and running; https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-postfix-e-mail-server-with-dovecot https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-setup-postfix-on-ubuntu-14-04