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Lamson is an SMTP server which acts as the gateway for emails from the outside world to be put in your mail store.

Switchboard doesn't have any direct connection to SMTP. It monitors changes in your mail store using IMAP IDLE and issues events to workers which can then do basically whatever your heart desires.

(btw, we host our switchboard mailing lists on librelist.com which is a showcase for Lamson. cool project)

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but Lamson enables those hooks/workers as well - but integrates with an FSM and a queuing mechanism (Celery) to get this done.

Additionally, there is Apache James (Java) which does something similar.

You're correct that Lamson provides tools for processing emails, but it doesn't include a mechanism for feeding it emails from IMAP servers. Switchboard actually complements Lamson -- Switchboard could manage IMAP connections, collect incoming emails, and feed those emails to Lamson. You'd be able to use Lamson in front of Gmail/Yahoo/etc

I'm not super familiar with Apache James, but it appears to be a mail server with pluggable components. Switchboard fits in as a layer between any mail server that supports IMAP, and its version of pluggable components [processes connection over the interface].

Thanks, this really helps us see where the documentation needs to be improved :)

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