Comment by steakejjs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steakejjs | Hacker News Reader

I wish the email stack was simpler.

While working on a project to learn go, I was using postfix to pipe email directly to a Go program, that then sent them as an SMS. I couldn't help but thinking how old and clunky the software I was using felt. The Go ended up being done in an hour and the postfix part took me 2 nights.

The same goes for all of the other email protocols and software. It's all big, bulky, and complicated. especially considering how much of a backbone email is to business today.

I know of the mailinabox project that was meant to package and abstract out a lot of the difficulties, but found that even that was too complicated.

Does anyone know of any projects meant to simplify the email stack?

I'm biased but as far as SMTP is concerned, you can hardly find something simpler than OpenSMTPD: pretty much any configuration can be described in less than 10 lines of config.

Here's my configuration on this desktop:

listen on all

accept from any for domain debug.poolp.org deliver to maildir

accept from local for any relay

I am making my living from administring linux/bsd boxes for small business or ISPs. I installed couple of full featured mailserver over time ...and i can tell, its not getting any better. It is strange area where technology moves much more slower and it is impossible to setup the full stack without bugs in first day for unskilled person. Even for me its not fun work to install and then maintain. (little self-promo here, i am trying to "start up" with http://poste.io )

Not what you are asking for, but possibly another approach to consider - https://bitbucket.org/chrj/smtpd.

Opensmtpd is really simple, and you might want to explore some of the programmability of the project. I think your looking for something like http://lamsonproject.org Lamson. I'm not sure it's maintained anymore, but it was an idea in that direction. For utter simplicity opensmtpd really is good.

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