view docs/masqmail.cx/index.html @ 357:7e0294a2545e

wrote new abstract
author meillo@marmaro.de
date Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:33:58 +0100
parents 7b2a5fe2aedd
children
line wrap: on
line source

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>MasqMail
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
  <BODY TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000ff" BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
    
    <center>
      <table width="80%">
	<tr><td>
	    <table width="100%" bgcolor="#0000aa" cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0>
<tr>
<td align=center width="100%"><font size="6" color="#ffffff">MasqMail</font></td>
</tr>
</table>

<center><img src="logo_masqmail.jpg" alt="MasqMail"></img></center><br>

<a href="index.html#intro">Introduction</a><br>
<a href="index.html#features">Features</a><br>
<a href="index.html#how">How it works</a><br>
<a href="index.html#plat">Platforms</a><br>
<a href="index.html#limit">Limitations</a><br>
<a href="index.html#secure">Security</a><br>
<a href="index.html#require">Requirements</a><br>
<a href="index.html#down">Download</a><br>
<a href="index.html#docu">Documentation</a></br>
<a href="index.html#road">Roadmap</a><br>
<a href="index.html#list">Mailing List</a><br>
<a href="index.html#bugs">Bugs and Suggestions</a><br>
<br>


<h2>Introduction</h2>

<p>MasqMail is a mail server designed for hosts that do not have a
permanent internet connection eg. a home network or a single host at
home. It has special support for connections to different ISPs. It
replaces sendmail or other MTAs such as qmail or exim.<p>

<p>Since version 0.0.10 it supports alias address expansion and can
deliver to pipes.</p>

<p>MasqMail is released under the <a href="http://www.fsf.org">GPL</a>
license.</p>

<a name="features"></a> <h2>Features</h2>

<ul>
<li>Delivers only when online to a destination 'outside' your LAN</li>
<li>Support for multiple Providers (ie. Mail Servers, or direct delivery)</li>
<li>Rewriting of Return addresses (Return-Path:, From:, Reply-To:),
configurable for each Provider separately</li>
<li>can also be used as a Mail Server on a LAN</li>
<li>alias support</li>
<li>delivery to pipes</li>
<li>delivery to MDAs (eg. procmail)</li>
<li>Maildir support (version >= 0.2.5)</li>
<li>routing depending on sender</li>
<li>AUTH (RFC 2554) support (as client, since version 0.1.0)</li>
<li>SMTP-after-POP</li>
<li>POP3 client</li>
<li>POP3 client daemon (fetch mail in regular intervals if online)</li>
</ul>

<a name="how"></a> <h2>How it works</h2>

<p>When offline, MasqMail queues all mail with a destination outside
of the local network. When you connect to the internet, masqmail will
be called with a connection name as an argument. MasqMail then sends
the queued mail to the configured mailserver for that ISP. When a
message from the local net is received when online, MasqMail delivers
it immediately. If there is no mail server for that ISP, MasqMail can
also send the mails directly to their destinations.</p>

<p>For each ISP different return addresses can be configured. This
makes it possible to get around spam traps which desire your return
address to be from the same domain as the host the mail is coming
from. This is not a problem if you always connect to a single ISP, but
is one if you use different ones from time to time. It also makes it
possible to configure your mailer to a return address on your local
network which maybe totally unknown outside. So delivery failure
messages originating on your local net can be sent directly to you,
while those that occur outside will be sent to the configured
address. <em>(Note that the return path is different from the From:
address or the Reply-to: address. You can still have a single address
where you want replys to be sent to).</em></p>

<p>When offline, MasqMail behaves just like any other ordinary mail
server (with a few limitations, but these will be fixed in the
future).</p>

<p>To detect its online status, MasqMail can take advantage of the <a
href="http://cpwright.com/mserver/">masqdialer</a> system. But it also
works well without it.</p>

<p>See the <a href="manual.html">manual</a> for more information.</p>

<a name="plat"></a>
<h2>Platforms</h2>

<p>MasqMail is being developed for Linux. It may run on other Un*x like
platforms, but it will certainly not run on Windows or a
Mac. Currently I see no point in porting it to other platforms.</p>

<p>But it is possible to use a Windows (or Mac or any system that
knows about SMTP) host as a client. Just configure your mailer to use
the machine MasqMail is running on as your mail server.</p>

<a name="limit"></a>
<h2>Limitations</h2>

<p>MasqMail is still in an early stage of development so use it with
caution! There may still be serious bugs in it, so mail might
get lost. But in the nearly two years of its existence so far there
was only one time a bug which caused mail retrieved via pop3 to be
lost in rare circumstances.</p>

<p>There are also some features every MTA should have:</p>

<ul>

<li> it does not use .forward files (but it uses alias files since 0.0.10)</li>
<li> it does not support retrieving mail from a multi-drop mailboxes</li>

</ul>

<p>But these are worked on.</p>

<p>MasqMail is <em>not</em> designed to run on a host with a permanent
internet connection. It does not have the ability to check for spam
mail and it will relay everything from everywhere to everywhere. Use
another mail server such as <a href="http://www.exim.org">exim</a>
for permanent connections.</p>

<p>BTW: I am already using it...</p>

<a name="secure"></a>
<h2>Security</h2>

<p>I hope that I have not done anything stupid, but there may be
security holes in it. If you find one, please tell me.</p>

<p>MasqMail does not listen to a port to the internet (unless you
manage to configure it to do so... which is pretty senseless anyway),
so that door is closed.</p>

<p>MasqMail is designed to run with an own user and group id. It uses
root permission only when necessary, ie. to open a listening port and
to change identity to some user when it delivers local mail.</p>

<a name="require"></a>
<h2>Requirements</h2>

<p>MasqMail requires glib 1.2 or greater. You may find this strange
since glib was originally written for gimp and is used by <a
href="http://www.gtk.org">gtk</a>, but glib does not necessarily have
to do with GUIs. It has some useful list and string functions, and I
use only these. This may change in the future when I write my own
utilities.</p>

<p>I develop MasqMail with a Debian woody distribution, Kernel 2.4.x and
glibc (libc6) with gcc 2.95. There have been reports that it compiles and
runs under Redhat, SuSE, slackware, with libc5 (since 0.0.4) and Kernel
2.0.x and 2.2.x, and FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.</p>

<a name="down"></a>
<h2>Download</h2>

<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.20.tar.gz">masqmail-0.2.20.tar.gz (http)</a> (unstable version, about 242K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.20.tar.gz.asc">masqmail-0.2.20.tar.gz.asc (http)</a>
detached <a href="http://www.gnupg.org">GnuPG</a> signature, signed with
<a href="oku.asc">451EAB1B</a>, fingerprint <pre>CDA0 CB53 83C6 84DF 760F  6BFE 5265 5226 451E AB1B</pre>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.18.tar.gz.md5sum">masqmail-0.2.20.tar.gz.md5sum (http)</a> (md5sum)<br>
<!--
<br>
<a href="http://www.sonic.net/~okurth/debian/dists/sid/main/binary-i386/masqmail_0.2.19-1_i386.deb">masqmail_0.2.19-1_i386.deb</a> Debian package for sid<br>
<br>
<a href="download/masqmail_0.2.18-0.sarge1_i386.deb">masqmail_0.2.18-0.sarge1_i386.deb</a> Debian package for sarge
-->
<br>
<br>
xdelta (binary patches), apply with
<pre>
xdelta patch file.xdelta old.tar.gz new.tar.gz
</pre>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.12-0.2.13.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.12-0.2.13.xdelta</a> (5K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.13-0.2.14.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.13-0.2.14.xdelta</a> (7K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.14-0.2.15.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.14-0.2.15.xdelta</a> (6K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.15-0.2.16.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.15-0.2.16.xdelta</a> (5K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.16-0.2.17.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.16-0.2.17.xdelta</a> (15K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.17-0.2.18.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.17-0.2.18.xdelta</a> (8K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.18-0.2.19.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.18-0.2.19.xdelta</a> (6K)<br>
<a href="download/masqmail-0.2.19-0.2.20.xdelta">masqmail-0.2.19-0.2.20.xdelta</a> (6K)<br>

<p>Note: the unstable version is pretty stable already.</p>

<a href="download/MasqMail-0.1.17.tar.gz">MasqMail-0.1.17.tar.gz (http)</a> (stable version, about 174K)<br>
<!--
<br>
<a href="../debian/dists/woody/main/binary-i386/masqmail_0.1.17-2_i386.deb">masqmail_0.1.17-2_i386.deb</a> Debian package for woody
-->
<br>

<p>Waldemar Brodkorb has made rpms for SuSE 7.0 and 7.1 <em>with</em> ESMTP AUTH,
see <a href="http://packman.links2linux.de/index.php4?action=091">this page</a></p>

<a href="download/ChangeLog">ChangeLog (unstable)</a><br>
<a href="download/ChangeLog-stable">ChangeLog (stable)</a><br>
<br>
See <a href="download/index.html">download/</a> if your are curious for older versions.

<p>masqmail is also in Debian. You will find it <a
href="http://packages.debian.org/masqmail">here</a>.</p>

<a name="docu"></a>
<h2>Documentation</h2>

<p>masqmail comes with a bunch of man pages, these are also available
<a href="manual.html">online</a>. Some people have written introductory pages
for the initial installation:</p>

<p>
Christoph Hertel has written a <a href="http://instruction.at/mmquickconfig">quick help</a> page for masqmail.
</p>

<a name="road"></a>
<h2>Roadmap</h2>

<p>MasqMail will be optimized for slow connections. It uses ESMTP
pipelining both when sending and receiving and sends all messages to a
single host in a single connection.</p>

<p>Apart from the missing things mentioned above, I plan to implement
the following features:</p>

<ul>
<li>ODMR support as a client</li>
<li>POP3 multidrop support</li>
</ul>

<a name="list"></a>
<h2>Mailing List</h2>

<p>There is now a <a
href="http://lists.masqmail.cx/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/masqmail">Mailing
List</a> for MasqMail. To subscribe or to view the archive use the
link.</p>

<a name="bugs"></a>
<h2>Bugs and Feedback</h2>

<p>Since MasqMail is very young, bugs are quite probable. If you
encounter one, send it to <a
href="mailto:oku@masqmail.cx">me</a>. Please tell me the versions of:
<ul>
<li>MasqMail</li>
<li>libc</li>
<li>OS (Linux) (use uname -a)</li>
<li>glib (use glib-config --version)</li>
<li>the compiler (use gcc -v)</li>
</ul>

<p>If not already so, set the debug level to at least 5 and send the
debug.log (only the important part please...).</p>

<p>To improve MasqMail, bug reports are really needed! The more bug
reports I get the more stable it will get.</p>

<p>Suggestions are always welcome. If there is a feature that you
would like to have in MasqMail, contact me, and I will think about
it. You are also welcome to send patches, but at this stage of
development there will be no CVS access.</p>

<p>If you are using it and are happy with, you can also write that to
me. To make <em>me</em> happy.</p>

<p>If you are not happy with it, you can keep that for
yourself. Before you send some flame, please read these pages very
carefully again.</p>

</ul>
	  </td></tr>
    
	<tr><td>
	    <p>
	    <hr>
	    <address>Oliver Kurth &lt;oku at masqmail dot cx&gt;</address>
	  </p>
    
      </table>
    </center>

  </BODY>
</HEAD>