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.

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.


