🚀 go-pugleaf

I am looking for one or more volunteers to take over primary
responsibility for greatly enhancing the smail3 mailer program for use
in the world of today.

The Smail3.1 mailer program is used by an increasing number of sites
throughout the world for routing mail through mailer zones that
conform to the mailer specifications of the greater Internet.
Smail3.1 is, conceptually at least, a follow-on project to the project
that created earlier smail releases, ending in smail2.5.  However,
smail3's goals were much more ambitious.  Smail2.5 operates primarily
in the UUCP zone, and requires interoperation with the generally
disliked sendmail program to operate over Internet networks.  Smail3.1
was written to be a complete replacement for sendmail and smail2.5,
and was intended to be very easy to configure.

With respect to the original design goals, smail3.1 has been very
successful.  It is very easy to configure, and works on the Internet,
the UUCP zone, and as a gateway between the two, pretty much
"out-of-the-box."  It is also simple to configure smail to handle a
variety of routing and mail management problems.

However, it has been almost four years since the program underwent
drastic change, and it is in need of a major overhaul.  The world has
become a different place from what the original designers thought it
was when the original architecture work was done.  Additionally,
smail3 is increasingly being used in areas that were not originally
considered.

I have worked on the project for almost five years now, while working
at three different companies.  At the first company I was a system
administrator, and had a fair amount of time to spend learning about
mail and experimenting with what I would want from a mailer.  My
second company was large enough that I didn't spend all of my time
working on my various assigned tasks, so I still had plenty of time to
work on smail3.  Near the end of my stay at my second company, I was
starting to recognize some of the problems and limitations of smail3
and began to work on a major overhaul.

Before I was able to complete the overhaul, I moved to my present
company.  I now work at a startup company, and have been for the last
two and a half years.  Since I started here, I have had little time to
devote to mailers, and have actually spent much more time than I can
really afford to.  What little time I have spent on the smail3 project
has been devoted to minor enhancements and bug fixes.  As a result,
the overhaul has been mostly on hold.  For a while, I had somebody
else continuing the overhaul work I had started, but the task proved
larger than that person had time for.  The work that was done was very
useful, but the end goal has also become somewhat of a moving target.
As such, much more needs to be done.

If smail3 is ever to become what it should be, somebody other than me
will have to do a great deal of the work.  I am looking for a
volunteer to be that person.  The task does not require a great deal
of initial mailer knowledge, but it does require a definite
proficiency in C, an ability to work with large software packages, and
an understanding of software portability within the many existing UNIX
and UNIX-like platforms.

I am interested in tracking major architectural decisions for the
evolution of smail3, but anyone who takes over the project will have
to be able to work reasonably independently.  I don't want to have to
spend more than a half hour per day (on average) helping, but I am
willing to put in that.

To give an idea of what the project entails, future smail3 work should
touch on the following areas:

	Internet networking (at the RFC822 and RFC821(SMTP) levels)
	Interaction with administrator-defined scripts and applications
	Interoperation with X.400
	Parsing of mail addresses
	Developing simple but powerful configuration file formats
	Intelligent management of short- and long-term message queues
	Efficient daemon processing
	Simple authentication
	Portability of a large daemon-based application
	Developing utilities to aid various aspects of mail administration

If you are interested in volunteering, I would appreciate hearing from
you.  Please send E-mail to the address in the signature.
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	tron |-<=>-|		ARPAnet:  veritas!tron@apple.com
      tron@veritas.com		UUCPnet:  {apple,pyramid}!veritas!tron