Celebrating small wins

About one month ago I released Postern, an open-source Mail Delivery Agent with a policy engine at its core.

I took two weeks off in September, and I am back at my day job at p25.dev.

p25.dev’s MTA is KumoMTA. I am happy with this choice, and I contributed a few PRs since. My contribution was highlighted in the latest Changelog. Thanks Wez for the kind collaboration!

p25.dev had some hiccups with Outlook (as every ESP has at least once), but I could sort it out fairly quickly with their support agents. There seem to be real humans working, answering quickly, and that was a good experience. (Don’t use Outlook though ;) )

Postern’s policy script can make HTTP requests now. Via HTTP, I can call my LLM provider Scaleway to generate a response based on a prompt and email content. I want to classify a dedicated set of emails. LLM is not the only but a convenient way to do that.

Because I write about email classification: This is not about SPAM. The idea to classify emails for HAM and SPAM with LLM is old. The problem always was execution speed and cost. This might change with Jev or open “system one models” once there will be open-source parameter sets.

For Postern, I also added the option to call binaries from the policy script and pipe emails (or attachments of those emails) into them. I use this for an upload script for specific email attachments that I want to store separately.

I will soon push those changes and formally release the first tagged alpha version of Postern. From a functionality perspective, it is sufficient, but I need to write more documentation so that users can get started easily. A good amount of experimentation went into Postern’s design to get the basic workflows smooth. Even if there’s nobody else interested in using it (which I hope is not the case), I am so hyped about it that I don’t want to work with any other MDA anymore.

Just wanted to celebrate a few small wins here.