ABOUT SUGOI MAIL

Sugoi Mail is a mailing list manager, with a difference!

Sure, you can use it just to run your normal mailing lists. Indeed, it does that very well! You can have thousands of mailing lists at your site with sugoi-mail.

But it’s much more than that. It takes the concept of the mailing list, and stretches it in every direction it can think of. Personal distribution lists? Why, that’s just another kind of mailing list. Closed announcement lists? Sure thing. Personal mail forwarding addresses like those on pobox.com (remember those guys)? Absolutely.

And built using the combined forces of Ruby on Rails and Gurgitate-Mail, you can combine the two in ways never thought of before. Want to build a simple webmail system? Sure! Want to integrate mail-forwarding as an extra for users of your bulletin board system? Don’t want to do that stuff yourself? Just call us and we’ll be glad to help you out.

Sugoi Mail: Building mailing lists out of webs and toffee.

NOTE FOR FOLKS GOING TO INSTALL IT: Right now, this is in a state that I’d call ALPHA, which is at least an improvement over the previous condition which was PRE-ALPHA. By this I mean, there’s actually something which you can install sanely now! If you say “gem install sugoi-mail”, then you can, in the style of typo and other rails-app-installer-using applications, say “sugoi-mail install foobar”, and it’ll set up a sugoi-mail installation inside the directory “foobar”.

What it will NOT (yet) do is, upon having installed sugoi-mail in foobar and having fired up mongrel, start maild. Yes, this is unfortunate. Especially since this is probably the first that you’ve ever heard about having to run something called “maild”.

Basically maild is the secret sauce that makes sugoi mail work as well as it does. It is to sugoi-mail as fastcgi is to a Rails app. Or maybe you like mongrel and mod_proxy better. But the idea is to start up a daemon that has everything you need pre-loaded and cached and ready to go, so that you don’t have to waste valuable processing time loading the approximately five thousand files that Rails wants to load up, to say nothing of connecting to the database.

Anyway, make sure you run “bin/maild”. Oh, and mailc? You set that up as a local delivery agent. Think of it kind of like gurgitate-mail. What I do is I set it up in Postfix as a transport in the file /etc/postfix/master.cf, kind of like this:

sugoi unix - n n - - pipe

flags=DRhu user=sugoi-user argv=/path/to/mailc -d ${recipient} --sender ${sender}

(IMPORTANT NOTE TO SELF: Check my facts on this before posting nonsensse to Rubyforge. Say, by looking at one of the sites where this thing is already installed. Also, remove this note before unleashing the gem on the world. If you see this note, be sure to send me email laughing about it!)

Parts of this have actually been in service for months, but there’s still no real interface, the SOAP interface is underdocumented and probably incorrect at this point anyway, and everythings overcomplicated. In other words: FOR ADVENTUROUS PEOPLE ONLY. That said, if you do decide to install it, I greet you! Let me know how it works out.

And finally, because my boss told me to put this here and he is, after all, kind enough to pay me good money to work on this: Sugoi-Mail is an open source project proudly sponsored by Invio, the makers of the Ichinichi Ichimon line of educational software.