insom / mta

Metropolitan Transportation Authority - a simple Mail Transfer Agent for just me

mta

What is the stupidest mail transfer¹ agent that could comply with RFC5321? I hope it is this one.

mta requires you to customize the HOMEDIR and EMAIL_ADDRESS defines at the top, then make it.

It is launched from inetd(8) by adding this line to /etc/inetd.conf:

smtp stream tcp nowait insom /home/insom/Repo/mta/mta

(if you're not insom you should probably replace the username and path appropriately).

It will deliver email into a Maildir that must already exist. If you don't have maildirmake installed you can get away with mkdir -p Maildir/new Maildir/cur Maildir/tmp && chmod -R 0700 Maildir.

I've experienced the real joy of having Fastmail deliver real email to my server and stored it in a Maildir where both s-nail and neomutt can read it correctly. Huzzah.

Footnotes

1. It's almost more of a mail-delivery-agent, especially as it cannot handle outgoing email, but MDA is a specific term that means something else not quite the same as this 🤷 ↩