Summary

Email has long been the most commonly used means of communication on the internet. This week Antoine Nguyen talks about his work on the Modoboa project to make hosting your own mail server easier to manage. He discusses how the project got started, the tools that it ties together, and how he used Django to build a webmail and admin interface to make it more approachable.

Preface

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Antoine Nguyen about Modoboa, a project to make mail hosting simple.

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• What is Modoboa and what is the problem that you were trying to solve when you started it?
  • Where does the name come from?
• Self-hosting an email server was a common activity during the early stages of the internet, what are some of the reasons that someone should consider running their own mail server now that there are so many options for third-party hosting such as Gmail and Outlook?
• Email hosting has become more complicated in recent years with the need to jump through a lot of hoops to maintain a sufficient reputation to keep your messages from being flagged as spam. Are there any utilities in Modoboa to assist with that process?
• There are a lot of components that you have brought together for running an email server. Can you describe how the different pieces fit together and what layers you have built on top to help make the overall system more manageable?
• What does the scaling strategy look like for Modoboa?
• What is the most challenging aspect of building and maintaining Modoboa?
• What are some of the features that you have planned for the future of Modoboa?

Keep In Touch

• Email
• @antngu on Twitter

Picks

• Tobias
  • Dropbox Paper
• Antoine
  • Capoeira

Links

• PyTk
• Postfix
• Dovecot
• Nextcloud
• Owncloud
• SPF Records
• DKIM
• DMARC
• SMTP
• IMAP
• Apache Libcloud
• Amavis
• Mail Transfer Agent
• Radicale
• Ansible
• Docker
• Gentoo
• Packer
• Synology
• Drobo
• Prosody
• Lua
• XMPP

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA