The Lamson Mail Server(TM)
======================
Lamson is a pure Python SMTP server designed to create robust and complex mail applications in the style of modern web frameworks such as Django. Unlike traditional SMTP servers like Postfix or Sendmail, Lamson has all the features of a web application stack (ORM, templates, routing, handlers, state machines, Python) without needing to configure alias files, run newaliases, or juggle tons of tiny fragile processes. Lamson also plays well with other web frameworks and Python libraries.
Lamson supports running in many contexts for processing mail using the best technology currently available. Since Lamson is aiming to be a modern SMTP server and Mail processing framework, it has some features you don't find in any other Mail server.
- Written in portable Python that should run on almost any Unix server.
- Handles mail in almost any encoding and format, including attachments, and canonicalizes them for easier processing.
- Sends nearly pristine clean mail that is easier to process by other receiving servers.
- Properly decodes internationalized mail into Python unicode, and translates Python unicode back into nice clean ascii and/or UTF-8 mail.
- Lamson can use SQLAlchemy, TokyoCabinet, or any other database abstraction layer or technology you can get libraries for. It supports SQLAlchemy by default.
- It uses Jinja2 by default, but you can swap in Mako if you like, or any other template framework with a similar API.
- Supports working with Maildir queues to defer work and distribute it to multiple machines.
- Can run as an non-root user on port 25 to reduce the risk of intrusion.
- Lamson can also run in a completely separate virtualenv for easy deployment.
- Spam filtering is baked into Lamson using the SpamBayes library.
- A flexible and easy to use routing system lets you write stateful or stateLESS handlers of your email.
- Helpful tools for unit testing your email applications with nose, including spell checking with PyEnchant.
- Ability to use Jinja2 or Mako templates to craft emails including the headers.
- A full alternative to the default optparse library for doing commands easily.
- Easily configurable to use alternative sending and receiving systems, database libraries, or any other systems you need to talk to.
- Yet, you don't have to configure everything to get stated. A simple lamson gen command lets you get an application up and running quick.
- Finally, many helpful commands for general SMTP server debugging and cleaning.
If you want to install Lamson then the best source of information is the documentation available at the site, particularly the following documents:
http://lamsonproject.org/docs/getting_started.html
http://lamsonproject.org/docs/deploying_lamson.html
You can get documentation, track news, watch screencasts (using actual GNU screen) and other information at:
If you want to get the source then you can use Bazaar:
bzr branch lp:lamson
Bazaar may ask you to login, but it should still give you the source.
Lamson is currently nearing the 1.0 stage, with almost everything you need to build an email based application server. The source is well documented, has nearly full test coverage, and runs on Python 2.5 and 2.6.
Lamson is released under the GNU GPLv3 license, which should be included with your copy of the source code. If you didn't receive a copy of the license then you didn't get the right version of the source code.
Most of the features for 1.0 are already being planned, but if you have suggestions for improvements or bug fixes then feel free to join the mailing lists and discuss them:
http://lamsonproject.org/lists/
There is also an IRC channel #lamson on irc.freenode.org you can join to chat, it has low volume and you usually get a fast response.
The Lamson project uses unit tests, code reviews, coverage information, source analysis, and security reviews to maintain quality. If you find a bug, please take the time to write a test case that fails or provide a piece of mail that causes the failure.
If you contribute new code then your code should have as much coverage as possible, with a minimal amount of mocking.
Lamson follows the same security reporting model that has worked for other open source projects: If you report a security vulnerability, it will be acted on immediately and a fix with complete full disclosure will go out to everyone at the same time. It's the job of the people using Lamson to keep track of security relate problems.
Additionally, Lamson is written in as secure a manner as possible and assumes that it is operating in a hostile environment. If you find Lamson doesn't behave correctly given that constraint then please voice your concerns.
Lamson is written entirely in Python and runs on Python 2.5 or 2.6 but not 3k yet. It uses only pure Python except where some libraries have compiled extensions (such as Jinja2). It should hopefully run on any platform that supports Python and has Unix semantics.
The code is consistently documented and written to be read in an instructional manner where possible. If a piece of code does not make sense, then ask for help and it will be clarified. The code is also small and has a full test suite with about 95% coverage, so you should be able to find out just about anything you need to hack on Lamson in the Lamson source. Particularly you can find online API documentation here:
http://lamsonproject.org/docs/api/
Given the above statements, it should be possible for anyone to take the Lamson source and read through it in an evening or two. You should also be able to understand what's going on, and learn anything you don't by asking questions.
If this isn't the case, then feel free to ask for help understanding it.