Many of my readers will already know that I have recently been deeply involved in the KumoMTA project. This can help to explain the lack of posts here in the last 2 months, but that cannot be an excuse to not update this blog so I want to share a side project here that is related to KumoMTA.
If you are not aware yet, KumoMTA is a high-volume email delivery tool used by large brands and commercial senders. It is a delivery agent that allows companies to deliver millions of emails every hour to their customers with deep reporting capabilities and precision tuning controls.
Now before you jump to the ‘spam’ conclusion, let me correct your thinking. High-volume delivery engines like this are used to send massive amounts of alerts and notifications that our society runs on today. Imagine if you are a Disney fan (for example) and you sign up for event notifications. When something is coming up in the Disney universe, they have to notify hundreds of millions of customers about that event and everyone wants their notification at roughly the same time. Even if we sent emails at 1 million messages an hour, that would take hundreds of hours to send all of them. Do you want to wait days (or weeks) to get your notification? No way, you want it within a few minutes, and so does everyone else. This is where that software is used.
So anyway, I have been deeply involved with the creation of the KumoMTA project which can do the kind of delivery I mentioned above. This is not the kind of software you just download and install on your PC or Mac and operate from your kitchen table. This software is meant to run on multiple servers in remote data centres with fibre networks connected right to the big pipes in the Interwebs. In short, you or someone on your team should probably have “engineer” in a title before you try running this.
For this reason, I’ve been working on detailed tutorials for users and installers, and I also have recently published an “installer” of sorts that can be used to speed up the deployment of this project. Like KumoMTA, this code is open source so anyone can clone it and make it their own. It is written as bash scripts so it should be easily translated to automation tools like Puppet, Ansible, and Chef.
To be clear, there is no real magic here, and it is all simple Linux command line work you can do manually, but putting it all in an automation script can save a great deal of time and duplication. This is the kind of thing a mail ops or system ops engineer would do anyway, but hopefully, this will save some engineering effort and get you to a running system faster.
Finally, I want to clarify that this is my personal installer script and is not supported or endorsed by KumoCorp in any way. If you find it helpful, It would be great if you could buy me a coffee to make the work worthwhile. If you have edits or suggestions, Issues and Pull Requests are always welcome.
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