Options for mail server

[Kyle Strasser]

Hey all,

After some digging I've found that there are a few options for our mail server-

1) Twisted's packaged twisted.mail.smtp, coupled with an appropriate smtp server
2) The standard Python package smtplib, coupled with an appropriate smtp server

3) The Unix sendmail command

The problem with 1) and 2) is that they require an smtp server to be running, most of which seem to require you to compile code which is something we want to avoid. I've found an SMTP service called Quotient which is part of a package called Divmod Mantissa, which is apparently based on/runs on the Twisted framework. I haven't tested it yet, but from what I read it's a real pain to set up and get going with, which is also something we hopefully want to avoid. So, we could probably package it with Longhouse the same way we package Twisted, but there would be setup effort involved, unlike Twisted. The Divmod stuff is viewable here: http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/WikiStart

There's also a tool called PostfixEnabler for OSX that sets up a native SMTP/IMAP server, but it obviously doesn't exist for Unix or Windows. http://cutedgesystems.com/software/PostfixEnabler/index.html

Option 3) seems doable, except it confines us to Unix-based systems. This _should_ be doable on OSX as well, except that it fails silently on my machine. I see some 10.2-era talk on the Web about the BSD-esque sendmail implementation on OSX not working properly until you run some setup routines, which means that our OSX users would have to run the setup routines when they want to start using Longhouse. This explains why my testing with sendmail has been failing silently, since I don't know what the setup routines are.