Welcome to the Vorpal Mail Home Pages


Welcome to the home of Vorpal Mail

Looking for the main project? Try Source Forge or for the CVS repository.

Vorpal Mail is intended as a more user-friendly (or should that be admin-friendly) replacement for the standard sendmail package. It's aims are to provide all the features that are required of a modern mail server, without all the complexity caused by sendmail's rules based configuration file.

My "official" GNU listing is here.

Relase 0.6.13 is now out

The latest version of Vorpal Mail is now available, and fixes a number of bugs that were affecting stability. I have had the current version running for approximately 3 weeks now without any problems. Any users of older versions are recommended to update.

Why another mail program?

Vorpal Mail started life simply because I was finding sendmail to be too cumbersome to configure for a remote site I was setting up. Because of the (slightly odd) requirements for the way email needed to be sent and received, I found myself having to add explicit rules for each received user, and thought there had to be a better way. After a brief perusal of the relevant RFC's for SMTP and email, I decided to write a simple C++ class capable of communicating with an SMTP server. Approximately a week later the first version of Vorpal Mail was born.

Who should use it?

Firstly, Vorpal Mail is beta-quality software, so it shouldn't be used in any mission critical environment yet. Vorpal Mail is intended to be used by small businesses who need an email server capable of supporting either a dial-up or direct connection, but doesn't require them to have a full-time unix sysadmin capable of configuring a full-blown sendmail system. To this end, Vorpal Mail will be supported by Vorpal Manager, a menu-driven system management program that is intended to integrate Linux, Samba and Vorpal Mail accounts in a logical, consistent way.

What can it do?

So far, Vorpal Mail is capable of relaying messages via a smart host, and can perform virus scanning (via an external virus scanner, such as Sophos Anti Virus), Virtual Domains, and has flexible relaying rules. The latest version (0.6.13) has removed many of the older stability problems

What's planned for the future?

Once the basic functionality is running and properly tested, the current plan is to expand Vorpal Mail to provide an integrated mail server. To this end POP3 client and server code will be added, allowing Vorpal Mail to deliver messages to clients via POP3, as well as collect mail using POP3 from remote hosts that do not support SMTP delivery. By integrating SMTP and POP3 together, Vorpal Mail will remove the requirement for POP3 mail users to have a shell account upon the mail server, further enhancing security.

I want to know more!

Vorpal Mail development is being hosted at SourceForge, and the current version can be downloaded from there. All questions or comments should be sent via email to me at: [email protected]

Vorpal Mail at SourceForge