From: Zed
Title: About Lamson

Lamson started more than a year ago as a fun side project of "mine":http://zedshaw.com/ 
after a few evil experiences with sendmail and various mailing list software.  I 
realized that e-mail systems didn't have anything like a modern "framework" for building 
applications.  Rather than replicate the mess of aliases, pipes, processes, and nasty m4 
macros that currently existed, I decided to write something different.

Lamson was originally called "Son Of Sam", but that name proved too difficult to work
with as a project name.  Apparently people don't like their software named after serial
killers (actually, that was his dog's name).

"Lamson Tubes" is a colloquial name for Pneumatic Tubes which were used last century to 
deliver mail, packages, and hazardous material to the corporate world.  They are still
in use today.

Now Lamson is a fully functioning SMTP server, relay, proxy, and e-mail application framework.
It supports most RDBMS, has templates, and is easy to manage and deploy.  Lamson is smarter
than most any e-mail processing system out there thanks to Python and the use of easy to code
Finite State Machines.

However, as great as Lamson is for processing email intelligently, it isn't the best solution
for delivering mail.  There is 30+ years of SMTP lore and myth stored in the code of mail
servers such as "Postfix":http://www.postfix.org/ and "Exim":http://www.exim.org/ that would
take years to replicate and make efficient.  Being a practical project, Lamson defers to much
more capable SMTP servers for the grunt work of getting the mail to the final recipient.

I currently use Lamson in my own work, but I'm always looking for people doing 
interesting things with e-mail.  Even if you're a spammer, or someone trying to
destroy the spammers, I want to hear from you.

If you've got something interesting, feel free to "contact me":/contact.html and
talk about it.


