Automating aliases blogpost

content/posts/automating-aliases.md

@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
+---
+title: "Automating email aliases using Mailinabox and curl"
+date: 2021-04-30
+draft: false
+---
+
+With every piece of furniture, website and bowl of instant ramen asking you to register a user account, it's getting hard to remember anything. Furthermore, the companies which so gladly hoard our contact information are having a hard time protecting it, and it seems like the age of password managers and email aliases is upon us.
+
+One cool thing about email aliases is that they let you know which company is sending most spam your way. As a big fan of self-hosting, I have a Mailinabox and I recently found out about its [REST API](https://mailinabox.email/api-docs.html). In my pursuit for comfyness, I tried to automate the creation of aliases.
+
+# The credentials
+
+First of all, all of Mailinabox's API needs admin authentication, either an `api_key` or a `user:password` tuple. Since the former needs the later, I'll just use user and password. Even though `curl` tries its best to hide its command line arguments from terminal history, it's just not good practice to pass `-u admin@mydomain:mypassword` directly. Reading a bit in its manual, I found out that option `-K -` lets you pass config parameters from stdin, like so:
+
+```$ gpg -qd credentials.gpg | curl -X GET "https://{host}/admin/mail/users?format=<string>"```
+
+Where `credentials.gpg` is an encrypted file with the text `-u mail:password`. This way, you can safely use this without fear of your credentials leaking into logs or `ps` output. If everything worked just right, you should be able to see a list of all of your mails.
+
+Note that for GPG to be able to ask for secret key's password interactively, you may need to define `GPG_TTY` in your `.bashrc` or equivalent.
+
+# Creating the alias
+
+The command for alias creation would be something like this:
+
+```bash
+$ gpg -qd credentials.gpg | curl -X POST "https://{host}/admin/mail/aliases/add" \
+-d "address=<new-address>" \
+-d "forward_to=<true-address>"
+```
+
+This is fine and usable, if a bit tedious. I like to set my aliases to random strings, so malicious actors cannot deduce the true email address. A simple shell script that creates a random email alias would look something like this:
+
+```bash
+#!/bin/sh
+
+DOMAIN="@<your domain>"
+HOST="<your host>"
+NEW_ADDRESS=$(tr -dc a-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 13 ; echo '')
+TRUE_ADDRESS="<your mail@your domain>"
+
+gpg -qd credentials.gpg | curl -X POST "https://${HOST}/admin/mail/aliases/add" \
+                               -d "update_if_exists=0" \
+                               -d "address=${NEW_ADDRESS}@${DOMAIN}" \
+                               -d "forwards_to=${TRUE_ADDRESS}" \
+                               -K - | grep "alias added" && echo "${NEW_ADDRESS}@${DOMAIN}"
+```
+
+We're using 13 alphanumeric characters (all lowercase) to maximize compatibility. We could pipe the new email address into something like `xclip -sel clip` to have it in our clipboard right away. Note that we need to grep curl's stdout to know if the account was actually created, since it will still return 0 on a failed creation.
+
+# Making it comfier
+
+Making this script into a keyboard hotkey that does not need a terminal is a pain, since `gpg`'s pinentry depends on `gpg-agent`. Rather than dealing with it, I'd recommend either using a new  passwordless private key for the file or manually creating an input dialog box with something like `zenity`.
+
+This is a script that works as a window-manager-launched keyboard shortcut:
+
+```bash
+#!/bin/sh
+
+DOMAIN="@<your domain>"
+HOST="<your host>"
+NEW_ADDRESS=$(tr -dc a-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 13 ; echo '')
+TRUE_ADDRESS="<your mail@your domain>"
+
+zenity --password | \
+gpg --batch --passphrase-fd 0 --pinentry-mode loopback -q -d /full/path/to/credentials.gpg | \
+curl -s -X POST "https://${HOST}/admin/mail/aliases/add" \
+     -d "update_if_exists=0" \
+     -d "address=${NEW_ADDRESS}@${DOMAIN}" \
+     -d "forwards_to=${TRUE_ADDRESS}" \
+     -K - | grep "alias added" && echo "${NEW_ADDRESS}@${DOMAIN}" | \
+     xclip -sel clip && notify-send "Email created" || notify-send "Email creation failed"
+```
+
+Of course, you may dispense with the `notify-send`. I haven't delved into it since you don't always need a password along with the email and most browsers have very decent password generators, but automating [KeePassXC's great CLI tools](https://www.mankier.com/1/keepassxc-cli) (or whatever alternative floats your boat) to generate and add passwords at the same time for these accounts shouldn't be terribly hard.

content/posts/automating-tags.md

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
-title: "Automatizing tags using Make and GCC"
+title: "Automating tags using Make and GCC"
 date: 2021-04-29
 draft: false
 ---