MeTA1 (original) (raw)

Last Update 2025-01-27

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News

MeTA1 1.0.0.0is available! (2014-05-25)

Overview

MeTA1 is a message transfer agent that has been designed with these main topics in minds:

Security
Reliability
Efficiency
Configurability
Extendibility

MeTA1 consists of five main modules of which only one runs as root:

mcp: the main control program is similar to inetd(8): it starts all other MeTA1 modules and watches over their execution. mcp runs as root in order to bind to port 25 and to change the uid of the processes it starts.
smtps: the SMTP server receives e-mails.
smtpc: the SMTP client sends e-mails.
smar: the address resolver provides lookups in various maps including DNS for mail routing.
qmgr: the queue manager controls the flow of e-mails through the SMTP servers and clients.

All of these modules run persistently. smtps and smtpc make use of the statethreads library which provides a threading API well suited for Internet applications, smar and qmgr use the POSIX threads API.

The syntax of the MeTA1 configuration file is very simple and resembles C programs or the BIND 9 configuration files. A configuration file does not require any special layout, e.g., tabs or one option per line, but relies on braces and semicolons as structuring elements.

The first release of MeTA1 is intended to be used as a secure and efficient mail gateway. It offers features that are not available insendmail 8(or some other open source MTAs), however, it does not provide any builtin support for mail content modification, e.g., masquerading of addresses or changing (addition, removal) of headers. Those features are currently only available via thepmilter API.

Moreover, this version of MeTA1 does not come witha local delivery agentnor witha mail submission program. Thedocumentationexplains which programs can be used to perform these tasks and how other features that are not directly available can be implemented.

Policy Mail Filter Support

MeTA1 comes with a policy mail filter library (libpmilter) which offers similar features as libmilter known fromsendmail 8. Two milter programs have been ported to the pmilter API and are available in the contrib directory.

Multiple Policy Mail Filters

(2009-01-06) The libpmilter library only provides hooks for a single pmilter, to interact with multiple milters a_PMilter Multiplexor_is needed. This has been implemented bySergey Poznyakoffin hismailfromdsoftware.

Documentation

All aspects of MeTA1 (including installation, configuration, and operation) are documented in a single README file which is available in various formats (dvi,HTML,PostScript,PDF, andplain text) such that the user can select the most appropriate format for her needs. Additionally, a design document is separately available for background reading which also covers the implementation and many other aspects.

MeTA1 License

MeTA1 has basically the same license assendmail 8. However, it contains several other modules (e.g., Berkeley DB, statethreads) which come with their own licenses.

MeTA1 Source Code

MeTA1source code is availablefordownload. It comes with aREADME file in various formats.

Latest Release

The latest version of MeTA1 is1.1.Alpha21.0(2025-01-26)

MeTA1 Projects

There are manypossible projectsthat would help MeTA1 gain more traction as they provide features that have (repeatedly) been asked for.

MeTA1 History

MeTA1 is a fork of the sendmail X project.

Comparison with other MTAs

What are the differences betweenvarious modern MTAs?

CA for https

TheCA certfor the web site and the e-mail server can be used for authentication.

MeTA1 Feedback

Please send feedback about MeTA1 to

< MeTA1 + feedback (at) MeTA1 . org >

(sorry for the obfuscation, replace (at) with @ and remove the spaces)

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