It was one year ago that KumoMTA was officially born, with Wez making the first commit to the main repo (see it here)!
It's been quite a year for KumoMTA in the interim, with six releases since then (changelogs here), representing over 42,000 lines of code and over 250 pages of documentation. The effort hasn't just been by the KumoMTA team; we've had three external contributors in that time whose contributions we greatly appreciate!
Some of my favorite features introduced over the last year include:
- * Config as Code, allowing MailOps professionals to move past static config files and maybe some fixed scripting capabilities to something that becomes a fully-integrated part of their environment.
- * Policy Helper modules to coalesce that flexibility back into static config files for those who don't need the full power of Config as Code.
- * Native Tenant and Campaign awareness, so that tenant and IP are no longer conflated, making it easy for shared IP providers to manage their tenant traffic separately from their IP traffic.
- * Support for our cloud users by implementing Redis shared throttles, HAPROXY and SOCKS5 proxy support, and APIs for message injection/templating, server status and metrics, and administration.
- * The ability to route messages and log data across a variety of channels including AMQP, HTTP (Webhooks), and Kafka.
- * Cluster-Aware Traffic Shaping Automation with automatic MX rollup. No longer do MailOps admins have to maintain macros of which MXes belong to which provider, it all happens automatically.
- * Support for the latest security standards including modern TLS/SSL, DANE, and MTA-STS.
All that and more, on six pre-built OS repos, with testing for user-built installs on over a dozen more, including on ARM!
KumoMTA is in live production use across multiple global users, including our first sponsors at Taguchi Marketing, who have sent over 300,000,000 messages since deploying KumoMTA.
One Year of Community
One of our key goals when we started down this road was to build a MailOps community this time. Where community options existed previously, they were focused around a single vendor, often behind a paywall. We wanted to create a community for MailOps and DeliverabilityOps professionals, regardless of which MTA they use.
Our Discord server now has 177 members and has active conversations on a variety of topics, as well as a help forum through which both our team and our community members have been able to help new KumoMTA members get started as they migrate to KumoMTA for their sending.
We've also been able to hold a series of Community Roundtable calls to help connect our community members and help them share knowledge on subjects including moving MTAs to the cloud, analytics, and getting ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Finally, we've been holding community dinners where our travels take us, just MailOps people sharing a meal; no sales, no pitches, no presentations. This is a small industry and it's great to bring people together who may not have met previously.
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The Future Looks Bright
- The second year of KumoMTA is off to a great start, with some very useful capabilities coming to help our users handle the latest changes in the sending space.
- The installed footprint of KumoMTA is steadily growing, with servers deployed by users around the globe, and some very exciting new users being announced later in the year.
- Our community continues to grow, with both KumoMTA users and general MailOps professionals joining almost daily, and we're working on even more ways to bring this community together and help each member grow in their skills, whether they are a KumoMTA user or not.
We'll be at even more events this year, including participating in a panel on the state of MTAs at the Amsterdam Deliverability Summit in April. It's looking to be a great event and we'd love to see you there!
Watch this space, the best is yet to come!