qdated

The qdated-now program

qdated-now creates an e-mail address extension consisting of a timestamp and a cryptographic cookie. The cookie is a hash created from the timestamp and the contents of ~/.qdated-key. You must run qdated-makekey to create ~/.qdated-key before running qdated-now. The cookie prevents the timestamp from being altered: if someone were to try to use an expired address by advancing the timestamp to a later time, the cookie would no longer correspond to the timestamp, and mail sent to the altered address would be bounced by qdated-check.

Interface

     qdated-now [seconds|days]
seconds|days, if specified, will future-date the timestamp by the number of seconds or days. If the argument given is less than 1,000, it will be interpreted as a number of days. Otherwise, it will be interpreted as a number of seconds.

How to use it

The output of qdated-now will look similar to the following:
     264987.ejdba

This output is intended to be an extension to a user name in an e-mail address, for example:

     jblough-dated-264987.ejdba@example.com

Mail sent to this address can be verified by qdated-check in ~/.qmail-dated-default.

How you send mail with a timestamped address will depend on what mail program you use. With mutt, for example, you can run:

     EMAIL=jblough-dated-$(qdated-now) mutt
or
     mutt -e "my_hdr From: Joe Blough <jblough-dated-$(qdated-now)>"