Lots of things happened in my life in the last ~2 months. But they've all been either too personal to post here or too insignificant relatively to the important things for me to want to take time to write them. I considered writing about the more personal things, but I decided against it. I think I might be about ready to pick up the stream of nonessential random tidbits again though... We'll see. The December issues of Linux Journal includes a review of my smtp daemon in the "At the Forge" column. Reuven Lerner entirely gets it when he focuses most of the review on how easy it is to write plugins for qpsmtpd and how flexible that system is, that's exactly the point and by far the best reason to use qpsmtpd.
I was able to write a new, working plugin within a few hours of downloading qpsmtpd, despite the lack of good documentation, and I'm sure that many other readers will have similar experiences. The fact that qpsmtpd is written in Perl means you have fast, easy access to everything that a usual Perl program would, as well as any CPAN modules that could make development easier.
I have been using qpsmtpd for about a month, and the amount of spam in my mailbox has declined rather impressively, even from the low amount that SpamAssassin was letting through. If you run your own machine, I strongly encourage you to look at qpsmtpd. It is an excellent example of how to write software to take arbitrary plugins, and as a bonus, you will receive only the mail that you should receive.I haven't taken time to tar up a new release since June, or even kept up with all the ideas and new plugins posted on the mailing list (mail qpsmtpd-subscribe@perl.org to subscribe). However Matt Sergeant has been making lots of improvements and applying patches. I'm very grateful for that; without him development would look entirely stagnated in the last months. I started work on qpsmtpd a bit over two years ago just to have an easily hackable smtp server to use at perl.org. The first version was more or less just colobus changed to speak smtp instead of nntp. After using that for a while I got it built out to have an Apache like API system for writing modules, or plugins as I call them. That made it surprisingly easy even for people who had never done perl work before to hack up useful enhancements or test new spam fighting ideas. It's very amusing, interesting and satisfying to see a community grow and thrive around something you've built.
