We've Been Busy
It's been a busy year for us here at KumoMTA. We've built three major releases, traveled the world spreading the good word about KumoMTA, and curated a growing community.
We've also spent 2024 helping numerous new sponsors and users migrate their legacy email infrastructure to KumoMTA in production.
Here are some highlights, and keep reading for a glimpse into what 2025 holds for KumoMTA:
KumoMTA Grew & Evolved
KumoMTA evolved significantly in 2024. In total, we had hundreds of commits across three new releases that introduced a variety of new functionality, including significant enhancements for k8s scaling, automated builds of our ARM64 support (previously supported, but we only built for x86-64), and enhancements to Traffic Shaping Automation, especially around per-domain feedback from MBPs that leverages our existing campaign/tenant queue architecture.
In addition to our tagged releases, each and every commit (multiple per week as seen in the graph above) resulted in new builds in our -dev repo for each of our supported distros, including a multi-arch Docker container.
Our Sponsor List Grew
While our work in 2023 was largely based on a roadmap drawn from our experience in the email infrastructure industry, 2024 was the year we evolved KumoMTA based on our sponsors' feedback and requests. In 2024 we saw a 10x growth in sponsorships, helping ensure the long-term viability of KumoMTA and the ongoing success of our sponsors and users.
The work of our PS team in helping our sponsors migrate to KumoMTA in production helped ensure that KumoMTA is battle-tested and helped evolve the number of metrics, tunables, and capabilities provided by KumoMTA to the benefit of our entire community of users and contributors.
Our Community Grew
The thing about Open-Source is that you never fully know how large your community is because there's no requirement to register in order to download or use KumoMTA, but we're grateful for the growth of our community that we have been able to observe.
Our Discord server started 2024 with around 150 members, and as of writing we are only a few new members away from reaching the 500 member milestone!
While not every user can be a sponsor, we appreciate those who have self-identified as production users of KumoMTA. Not all can be shared publicly, there are over a dozen identified production users leveraging KumoMTA to send a collective total of over 500 million email messages per day.
Our developer community has also grown. We currently have sixteen contributors whose pull requests have been accepted for their contributions to KumoMTA. Each contribution helps with our commitment to keep KumoMTA Open-Source forever; we do not require our contributors to sign any contributor agreements, meaning that they retain the copyright to their contributions, which they also release under an Apache 2 license.
Our Team Grew
Thanks to the support of our generous sponsors, we've been able to grow the team behind KumoMTA. We've recently been able to secure the assistance of Dirkjan Ochtman, an experienced Rust developer and contributor to several projects we leverage in KumoMTA including rustls and hickory-dns.
Dirkjan is helping with our message-receiving roadmap by building support for validating SPF and DMARC (adding to our existing DKIM validation support). These capabilities not only help address the interest we've seen from the mailbox operator community, but they also help senders verify the compliance of their messages in real-time during egress.
The Future is Bright
In 2024 we've laid the foundation for 2025 to be another 10x year. Our team has helped several enterprise senders complete their evaluations of KumoMTA and we look forward to assisting them in bringing their architectures to production. In very large sending environments these kinds of changes are not done lightly, nor are they done quickly, but they will make 2025 a very busy year for the KumoMTA team.
Next year we're looking forward to sponsoring our first industry conference. Last year we attended the Deliverability Summit in Amsterdam, sponsored by our friends at Postmastery, and found it to be an excellent event. This year promises to be even better as the event incorporates more content on MailOps and on-prem sending, including some delivered by our team.
As a gold sponsor we've secured a discount for our friends and sponsors, visit https://deliverabilitysummit.com/KumoMTA for more information.
Thank you all for your support in 2024 and we look forward to what you'll do with KumoMTA in 2025!
Mike, Tom, and Wez