why mailpit

[bwdmr]

it is rather often to find a smtp client. but the server itself is seldom to be found.
why opt for writing a custom implementation?
what was added on top of existing features?
what has been left out from the known features?

i am fairly new to the mail ecosystem, ive seen that postfix has quite a development pace. so i intend to direct this conversation from the standpoint of a user that knows postfix.

[bwdmr]

ive did some digging. and found mhal repo as well as fritzpatricks one.
while mailpit kept most of mhal's implementation i still wonder about design choices, conformity to rfc's and which were considered irelevant etc.

[axllent]

Mailpit is a developer email testing tool - it's designed to catch all outgoing email from applications during development, not to act as a production mail server. That context shapes most of the design decisions.

The SMTP implementation isn't written from scratch - it's a modified fork of mhale/smtpd (which is what you found). On top of that base, Mailpit has added a number of RFC compliance fixes as well as unix socket support and the Chaos feature.

Mailpit was written as a replacement for MailHog, which had become unmaintained and had serious performance problems. The overall architecture is inspired by MailHog but the code is a complete rewrite.

Which repo are you referring to with "fritzpatricks one"? I'm not sure I know which project you mean.