I attempted to make amends one comment below this. I will switch the library to using a decorator based approach -- it's as clean, and there's no reason for me

I attempted to make amends one comment below this. I will switch the library to using a decorator based approach -- it's as clean, and there's no reason for me to break convention (I'll lash myself a few times to be safe too ;) With regards to instance variables: On a request, the main process forks and a new instance of the route object is instantiated. Trust me, instance variables won't leak between requests: This is what happens when a request comes in, the parameters to process_message are described here: http://docs.python.org/library/smtpd.html http://docs.python.org/library/smtpd.html @pytoad_decorator() def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, message_data): for RouteClass in self.routes: route = RouteClass(peer_ip=peer[0]) route.route(message_data)