About Lamson

Lamson started more than a year ago as a fun side project of mine 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 and Exim 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 and talk about it.