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4 \section*{\centering Abstract}

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6 \masqmail\ is a mail transfer agent for workstations and small networks, and a small replacement for \sendmail, \postfix, and \exim\ in those cases. It has be orphaned by its author more than five years ago and remained unchanged since then, in a world where emailing did change. Nevertheless has \masqmail\ unique advantages that makes it still a valuable software.

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8 This diploma thesis is a scientific planning effort to revive \masqmail. It provides a highly structured analysis of \masqmail\ and its environment. Modern requirements for \masqmail\ are compared against the current state of the program to receive a list of pending work tasks. Further development strategies are carefully compared and discussed. Finally concrete plans and recommendations are defined with the goal of turning \masqmail\ into a modern mail transfer agent again.

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18 masqmail, mail transfer agent, \MTA, sendmail, market analysis, future of communication, unified messaging, non-permanent Internet connection, requirements for modern \MTA{}s, \MTA\ architecture, \SMTP, authentication, encryption, spam handling, redesign from scratch.

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25 Copyright \copyright\ 2008,\,2009 by Markus Schnalke.

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28 This document was typeset in Palatino and Computer Modern font, using the LaTeX document preparation system on machines running the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Text editing was done with Vim. The PIC language and troff were used to generate the diagrams, in exception of figure \ref{fig:masqmail-arch} which was produced with Egypt and GraphVis. Mercurial was chosen for version control. Further programs and scripts were used for minor tasks---it was all Free Software, though.

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32 The final version of this thesis, in Portable Document Format and PostScript as well as the complete source code, can be retrieved from my website: http://marmaro.de/docs\,.

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35 Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute this document in verbatim form.

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