cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/2232241

I do not disclose email addresses anymore. Friends who want to reach me must use something else, like XMPP.

This arrangement works well enough but there is a snag. Tech-challenged folks often receive an email and they want to forward it to me. But email apps and XMPP apps are in separate bubbles.

In principle, the email app should have a “forward to xmpp” feature. But even if that were to exist (does it?), the low-tech demographic likely uses whatever web app Google pushes, which would not likely have such a feature.

So it seems a email→XMPP gateway is needed. I find this. That’s not a service. It’s kind of like: go build something. Is that where we are? Is that the state of the art?

Switchyard sounds like exactly what you are looking for, service that forwards email to XMPP. There's also milter-xmpp, which is a plugin to an existing mail server that supports postfix style mail-filters.

The Libervia email gateway might work:

https://www.goffi.org/forge/goffi/libervia-backend/src/branch/main/doc/howto_email_gateway.rst

https://www.goffi.org/forge/goffi/libervia-backend/src/branch/main/doc/components.rst

The how-to is a bit outdated (still work this way though), it can now start a component directly from the settings, without having to deal with CLI frontend, it's explained in components.rst

Switchyard seems to be geared towards internal forwarding of emails within a server.

But have you tried it? I might have a usecase for it other than what op wants and am wondering how usable it is.

I haven't used it, initially heard of it because I follow the developer's blog. Here's the blog post about it.

Cool to read that they plan to have it fall back on email when the address doesn't work via a xmpp.

I am curious to try it, but when thinking about it I realized my OIDC SSO solution uses email addresses as identifiers, which makes this a bit more complicated 😓