5 ms·

Lamson The Python SMTP Server

65 points by iamelgringo 17y ago

smhinsey 17y ago
is there similar software out there anywhere else? i am kind of stunned if this is the first attempt at solving this problem. it seems like a niche that might be dominated by an obscure commercial package but i didn't have much luck with google. [later] i'm impressed so far, i haven't thought about email like this in a long time.
- kree10 17y ago
  Qpsmtpd is similar (Perl instead of Python): http://smtpd.develooper.com/ http://smtpd.develooper.com/
- utx00 17y ago
  people have been using mta pipes to all sorts of scripting/dynamic/futuristic languages for years. that's what procmail is, except it has an ugly language. however it's not like one is using this 10 hours a day. you set it up, and you are done. if this is 1970ish, then so is typing ls (forks and pipes galore) on a terminal, and i don't see anyone complaining about that. i'm not exaclty thrilled with the use of a SQL backing store either, more to install, more to monitor, more things that can go wrong.
dfranke 17y ago
I wouldn't touch this without first giving it a very thorough security audit. Zed is right that most MTAs in use today are Byzantine horrors, but he misses out on why they were written that way: security. A mail server needs to bind to a privileged port, aggregate every user's mail into a single outgoing queue (which must be stored on disk for reliability), setuid into arbitrary users for delivery, and sometimes execute arbitrary commands given by those users (procmail). This is not an easy thing to get right. The reason for the strange design of Postfix, qmail, et. al. is to allow them to implement privilege separation wherever they possibly can. The thought of throwing all that away, and substituting a lightly-tested, monolithic program written in a dynamic language that permits monkey-patching at runtime and doesn't have Perl's taint checking support, makes me nervous to say the least. Mail servers, web servers, C compilers, libcs, and crypto libraries all seem to share the common property that their basic functionality seems enticingly easy to implement, inducing the naive to look at the mainstream implementations and think, "Look how stupidly bloated these are! I can do way better", and go on to produce nice elegant, minimalistic implementations that immediately fall over when put into production.
- mahmud 17y ago
  I wouldn't call the designs of Qmail or Postfix "strange", they're very well designed systems for what they do and given their age. I intimately know the workings of postfix, and while it's not nginx, it does everything it can to be modular and extensible: see how many ways it allows you to access the mail queue before a message is delivered, for example. Yep, THREE different, well documented ways, in increasing levels of ease/performance. P.S. Is it just me or has Exim declined in popularity? 10 years ago it was hard to choose between Qmail and Exim, and Postfix was the hot new thing.
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    I don't know how it landed on my server (maybe it was apt-get install mail), but: shephard@sbwc:~$ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 8.04.2 \n \l shephard@sbwc:~$ sudo netstat -anp | egrep -i tcp.25 tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0: LISTEN 21313/exim4 Ubuntu seems to have an affinity for exim somewhere...
    - ciupicri 17y ago
      Fedora, too AFAIK.
    - ralph 17y ago
      I think Ubuntu prefers Postfix; perhaps you did something specific to end up with Exim. "Postfix is the default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for Ubuntu." -- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix
  - skwiddor 17y ago
    Exim is the default on Debian
- ra 17y ago
  From the "about" page: http://lamsonproject.org/about.html http://lamsonproject.org/about.html However, as great as Lamson is for processing email intelligently, it isn’t the best solution for delivering mail. There is 30+ years of SMTP lore and myth stored in the code of mail servers such as Postfix and Exim that would take years to replicate and make efficient. Being a practical project, Lamson defers to much more capable SMTP servers for the grunt work of getting the mail to the final recipient. Also see this question in the FAQ: http://lamsonproject.org/docs/faq.html http://lamsonproject.org/docs/faq.html "What about security?! Shouldn’t Lamson be 20 processes?"
absconditus 17y ago
Attacking sendmail at this point is a bit silly. There are numerous options available that don't require learning sendmail's configuration syntax. While this project seems interesting, I'd be curious to see what its performance is like. High volumes of spam make performance a top concern.
jodrellblank 17y ago
body = view('confirmation.msg’).render( list=list, [...] Rebinding the list builtin in the snippet on your homepage? Is there a good reason for that?
- jerf 17y ago
  No, there's no good reason for it. The binding doesn't "go" anywhere, so it's not that big a deal either, but it's "bad style".
- inklesspen 17y ago
  That's not rebinding. That's a keyword argument. Now, the 'list' in the argument list is rebinding.
skwiddor 17y ago
Try this one in Awk http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk

65 points by iamelgringo 17y ago

is there similar software out there anywhere else? i am kind of stunned if this is the first attempt at solving this problem. it seems like a niche that might be dominated by an obscure commercial package but i didn't have much luck with google. [later] i'm impressed so far, i haven't thought about email like this in a long time.

kree10 17y ago
Qpsmtpd is similar (Perl instead of Python): http://smtpd.develooper.com/ http://smtpd.develooper.com/
utx00 17y ago
people have been using mta pipes to all sorts of scripting/dynamic/futuristic languages for years. that's what procmail is, except it has an ugly language. however it's not like one is using this 10 hours a day. you set it up, and you are done. if this is 1970ish, then so is typing ls (forks and pipes galore) on a terminal, and i don't see anyone complaining about that. i'm not exaclty thrilled with the use of a SQL backing store either, more to install, more to monitor, more things that can go wrong.

dfranke 17y ago

I wouldn't touch this without first giving it a very thorough security audit. Zed is right that most MTAs in use today are Byzantine horrors, but he misses out on why they were written that way: security. A mail server needs to bind to a privileged port, aggregate every user's mail into a single outgoing queue (which must be stored on disk for reliability), setuid into arbitrary users for delivery, and sometimes execute arbitrary commands given by those users (procmail). This is not an easy thing to get right. The reason for the strange design of Postfix, qmail, et. al. is to allow them to implement privilege separation wherever they possibly can. The thought of throwing all that away, and substituting a lightly-tested, monolithic program written in a dynamic language that permits monkey-patching at runtime and doesn't have Perl's taint checking support, makes me nervous to say the least. Mail servers, web servers, C compilers, libcs, and crypto libraries all seem to share the common property that their basic functionality seems enticingly easy to implement, inducing the naive to look at the mainstream implementations and think, "Look how stupidly bloated these are! I can do way better", and go on to produce nice elegant, minimalistic implementations that immediately fall over when put into production.

mahmud 17y ago
I wouldn't call the designs of Qmail or Postfix "strange", they're very well designed systems for what they do and given their age. I intimately know the workings of postfix, and while it's not nginx, it does everything it can to be modular and extensible: see how many ways it allows you to access the mail queue before a message is delivered, for example. Yep, THREE different, well documented ways, in increasing levels of ease/performance. P.S. Is it just me or has Exim declined in popularity? 10 years ago it was hard to choose between Qmail and Exim, and Postfix was the hot new thing.
- ghshephard 17y ago
  I don't know how it landed on my server (maybe it was apt-get install mail), but: shephard@sbwc:~$ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 8.04.2 \n \l shephard@sbwc:~$ sudo netstat -anp | egrep -i tcp.25 tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0: LISTEN 21313/exim4 Ubuntu seems to have an affinity for exim somewhere...
  - ciupicri 17y ago
    Fedora, too AFAIK.
  - ralph 17y ago
    I think Ubuntu prefers Postfix; perhaps you did something specific to end up with Exim. "Postfix is the default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for Ubuntu." -- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix
- skwiddor 17y ago
  Exim is the default on Debian
ra 17y ago
From the "about" page: http://lamsonproject.org/about.html http://lamsonproject.org/about.html However, as great as Lamson is for processing email intelligently, it isn’t the best solution for delivering mail. There is 30+ years of SMTP lore and myth stored in the code of mail servers such as Postfix and Exim that would take years to replicate and make efficient. Being a practical project, Lamson defers to much more capable SMTP servers for the grunt work of getting the mail to the final recipient. Also see this question in the FAQ: http://lamsonproject.org/docs/faq.html http://lamsonproject.org/docs/faq.html "What about security?! Shouldn’t Lamson be 20 processes?"

absconditus 17y ago

Attacking sendmail at this point is a bit silly. There are numerous options available that don't require learning sendmail's configuration syntax. While this project seems interesting, I'd be curious to see what its performance is like. High volumes of spam make performance a top concern.

jodrellblank 17y ago

body = view('confirmation.msg’).render( list=list, [...] Rebinding the list builtin in the snippet on your homepage? Is there a good reason for that?

jerf 17y ago
No, there's no good reason for it. The binding doesn't "go" anywhere, so it's not that big a deal either, but it's "bad style".
inklesspen 17y ago
That's not rebinding. That's a keyword argument. Now, the 'list' in the argument list is rebinding.

skwiddor 17y ago

Try this one in Awk http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk