Introducing Pony Express

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Wednesday, September 16. 2009

Introducing Pony Express

Email on a desktop Unix system is apparently a hard topic. At least, so far nobody seems to have solved it to my satisfaction... That's where the Pony Express comes in: a sensible /usr/bin/sendmail implementation for desktop sysstems:

No queue, no running processes.
pass users' email to a mail hub
support per user outgoing mail hub and SMTP authentication + TLS.
still allow local mail delivery, so stuff like cron will deliver to local mailboxes.

Mercurial repository is available; Pony Express is written in Python 3. I'll not upload a Debian package right now since as far as I've seen Python 3 is not supported by the usual Python helper scripts. Status: Lots of missing features and probably lots of bugs, but I use it from kmail to deliver mail, and the commandline "mail" also works. But that's the extent of the testing it has received so far, and in addition it's also one of the first things I've ever done in Python, so consider yourself warned. Still, feedback and patches welcome.

Update: Daniel, no, I can't. I missed msmtp when I looked for a solution after I saw that nullmailer and ssmtp wouldn't do what I wanted.

Update: cate / simon: my “apt-cache search” skills obviously suck, I didn't find esmtp either. Oh, well... I wanted to learn Python anyway, and since Pony Express is basically a frontend to Python's smtp library, it was not that much work. lamson sounds interesting for other projects, I'll have to look at it. From the description it's not what I want here, though. Marius: kmail does its own queueing, so I usually use the send later option and send non-local email from the commandline only while connected. I'll have to think about a non-daemon, non-cron queue style that suits my need (event-triggered from if-up.d perhaps), but as soon as I start to accept mail that I can't immediately get out of the system complexity goes up quite a bit. Developing PX into a full MTA would still be a fun project and I've got a few other ideas that I could incorporate. Not tonight, though ;-)

Posted by Adrian von Bidder in Pony Express at 11:50 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Interesting. Could you elaborate on the differences vs msmtp (in case you are familiar with it)?

#1 Daniel on 2009-09-16 12:46 (Reply)

Well, we have Python 3 support in python-apt in experimental => it works.

#2 Julian Andres Klode (Homepage) on 2009-09-16 13:13 (Reply)

esmtp supports authentication, SSL/TLS, per user configuration and local deliver (and it is not a daemon)

#3 cate on 2009-09-16 15:05 (Reply)

esmtp (or esmtp-run if you want it as your MDA) is another reasonable-looking implementation.

#4 Simon McVittie (Homepage) on 2009-09-16 15:12 (Reply)

Have you looked at lamson ?

#5 Anonymous on 2009-09-16 15:58 (Reply)

The 'no queue' would be a show-stopper for me, since I sometimes write emails while I'm offline (and Mutt doesn't have its own queue). The rest sounds sweet. Figuring out how to force Postfix to do all that (with the simplification that there's only one user on my laptop, so the per-user part is unnecessary) took me a while.

#6 Marius Gedminas (Homepage) on 2009-09-16 18:02 (Reply)

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