Twisted Mail Server: The Conclusion

Holy old code, Batman -- it's been about 2.5 years since I first blogged about the Twisted mail server I cobbled together. In the intervening time, I've received tons of emails and instant messages requesting that the code be put up somewhere. Well, that time has come...

I recently decommissioned a box I had at tummy.com which was my primary mail server for several years. After many years of qmail and a few months with Postfix, I wanted a solution that I had more immediate control over. At that time, Gmail for Domains was just announced and I became one of the beta testers for it. However, it was missing a few critical features, so I sat down and put together a mail server for myself. Abe Fetting had some nice examples in his O'Reilly book, so I started there. Then I jumped into the Twisted source code and discovered the rest that I needed.

A year or so later, Gmail for Domains (now Google Apps for business) was rockin' out, so I started moving my mail there. I eventually aliased the remainder of my domains and then stopped using the Twisted mail server. I kept the tummy.com box around for a while for DNS, but due to a tightening of the budget at home, I later had to pull the plug. When I reviewed the backup files from the server, I saw the old mail code and put it at the top of the list for my down-time projects.

I've sort of done that, but the process is incomplete. In the spirit of r0ml's OSCON 2008 talk, I'm placing this code in a public space for people to play with, find bugs in, report them, add patches, and branch from. The project page on Launchpad.net is here:

https://launchpad.net/tx/txmailserver

There are a couple non-standard parts of the code (in particular, the account, alias, and mail list management), but it can be improved very easily. The Dspam stuff was nascent at best (I didn't end up using it in production). Also, the relaying really needs to be looked into to make sure that it's done safely. A quick task someone could jump on right away is to convert the copious print statments to twisted.python.log calls.

Having the code in the state that it's in could be a lot of fun, really. The code base is tiny and there's nothing too tricky going on. For those that haven't had a chance to play with Bazaar, you can easily branch it to your own lp home dir, and if you make some cool improvements, I can easily merge those back in to the main branch. Looking at the list of branches, potential users and developers will be able to easily see the efforts that others have made. txMailServer could end up being a nice little piece of utilitarian code for folks...

Enjoy! And sorry it took so long :-(