Mnm – an open source project to replace email and SMTP

• mnm

  37 228 0.0 Go

  mnm implements TMTP protocol. Let Internet sites message members directly, instead of unreliable, insecure email. Contributors welcome! (Server)

>I was looking for protocol descriptions in how this could work. Author said people would be more impressed by code - but I think a protocol spec along with a reference implementation would be useful.

I went and looked for a protocol spec as well. When I didn't see anything concrete on the site in the submission title, I poked around the comments a bit more and found a link to the Github issue[0] requesting detail with respect to the architecture of the TMTP protocol.

I further poked around in the appropriate places[1] but found nothing remotely related.

The protocol spec[2], while useful in defining the control mechanisms and message formats is vague or silent when it comes to a variety (too many to list completely here) of functional, operational and implementation issues.

A comparison of TMTP's spec with SMTP[3] ("the protocol at the root of all these problems"[2] with messaging), is quite illuminating.

While SMTP by itself lacks a variety of features, it provides a robust, interoperable architecture that's broadly supported and has been augmented repeatedly by other protocols (e.g., MIME, DMARC/DKIM, SMTP-AUTH, LDAP, etc.) to provide such features.

It's not clear to me that mnm/TMTP has been fleshed out enough to provide a real alternative to SMTP+extensions. Rather, it appears to be another (there are many) client/server messaging application that's not interoperable.

Should these issues be addressed, discussed and refined in the appropriate forums[4], It's possible that TMTP could turn out to be a viable replacement for SMTP.

I applaud the authors' work and hope they have much success with their entry in the messaging app market.

[0] https://github.com/networkimprov/mnm/issues/5

[1] https://www.ietf.org

[2] https://mnmnotmail.org/rationale.html

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5321.txt

[4] https://ietf.org

• docker-mailserver

  92 13,339 9.4 Shell

  Production-ready fullstack but simple mail server (SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, Antispam, Antivirus, etc.) running inside a container.

  

I have been running my own mail server since the 1980s, using Debian/exim4 for the last eight years. With the weird patches for greylisting, etc., I never wanted to update it. In the last week, I jumped to docker-mailserver[0]. O.M.G. That is too easy! Yes, there is picking one's way through the options at first, but those go in a tiny config file and survive updates. The heavy lifting is all in one container. I just use it as a mail gateway, into a local machine that has port 25 filtered, but I played a bit with the imap functions, too. You do have to have a box somewhere that can run containers, which for me is a KVM VPS.

Gmail instantly was happy with my inbound emails. I got on a backscatter blacklist because I didn't immediately drop invalid email addresses at the gateway, but that will time out shortly. And just as I had settled in with the new server, I got to test the update function. This week the entire docker-mailserver project moved to a new repo name on Github, with a new release. A couple of the config files changed names, but nothing much in contents. A docker pull for the new image name, and my mail server was running the fresh release. Happy, happy, happy.

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

• InfluxDB

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  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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