Overview

Metis is a Erlang/OTP Mail Transfer Agent based on the gen_smtp library.
I couldn't find an open source MTA that was able to do throttling of the outgoing mail so I decided to write one. Mail log analysis was also a problem (busy mail server = huge textfiles as logs) therefore Metis uses Riak as the mail log backend.

###Screenshots

###Main features

• runs several mail queues on one host or on a cluster of hosts
  the smtp clients (queues) can run on the same host where the smtp server is running or can be on other hosts
  any number of clients can run on a host (eg. to bind to different network interfaces)
• distributes the emails between queues based on sender/recipient address or domain
• does load balancing between queues
• throttles outgoing mail on a per queue per domain basis
• has a web interface for traffic monitoring and log analysis

Note:
This is the first version. There's nothing particularly optimized and I mainly tested it on a cluster of Virtual Machines. I've just started testing it in a production environment.

Installation

Install dependencies

install erlang
install riak (not necessary but currently this is the only maillog backend it can use)
install procmail eg. on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install erlang riak procmail

Procmail has to be suid, guid. This is the default on Ubuntu but not on RedHat, CentOS so on RedHat do:
chmod ug+s which procmail

Clone or Download and Unpack

git clone git://github.com/zsolt-erl/metis metis

or

after downloading 
tar -xvzf metis.tar.gz

Compile

cd metis
make

Install

sudo make install

this will create the metis user and set up a full installation in /home/metis/metis if you are setting up a host that's only a client eg. only manages a queue and sends emails then do

sudo make client

Set up ssh

This is only needed if you are running Metis on a cluster. The server needs to be able to log in to the clients without a password to start the client nodes

sudo make keys

this will create a private and a public key
the private key is in /home/metis/.ssh/id_rsa
the public key is in /home/metis/metis/priv/id_rsa.pub

you need to copy the public key to each client host in the /home/metis/.ssh/authorized_keys file (either copy and rename or append it to the authorized_keys file)

test the connection (try to log in from the server host to the client host)

su - metis
metis@server_host> ssh client_host

this should log in to the client without asking for a password

Edit config files

config files are in /home/metis/priv on the server host

start with mta.conf, this is the main config file
mta.conf is set up to use aliases.conf, domain.conf and reroute.conf

you should change them to match your hostnames, sending rates, etc.

Configure riak

edit /etc/riak/vm.args
append:

-pa /home/metis/metis/ebin

restart riak if it was already running (riak restart is not enough, you need to stop and start riak: riak stop; riak start)
otherwise start it (riak start)

At this point the installation is done and the server is ready

Running

Server node needs to be started as root
Client nodes can be started as whatever user it'll be running as (default: metis)

su
su - metis    (on client node)
cd /home/metis/metis
./metis help

Starting the server:

./metis start

Stopping the server

./metis stop  

Starting / stopping the web gui

./metis web-start
./metis web-stop

Checking if it's alive

./metis ping

Getting server status

./metis status

Viewing recent mail log entries

./metis log

Web GUI

The Web GUI is available at http://metis-server-host:8010/gui
(8010 is the default port, it can be changed in priv/mta.conf)

The GUI shows the amount of

• emails received by the server
• emails sent (all the queues total)
• emails still in the queues
• softbounced / hardbounced emails
• emails deleted from the queues

The graphs for received/sent emails and queue size are updated every minute and show the last hour. The area below the graphs shows what's happening with each queue. If you click on the nodename of the queue a window comes up that shows a per domain breakdown of whats happening in the queue (it only shows domains that are controlled by that queue, see domain_control key in mta.conf). Domains that are not shown on this grid can still be routed through this queue however the flow to these domains is not controlled by the queue (no throttling, connection pooling). The last field in the grid is the message queue. If you double click on it it shows the result of the last 10 attempts to send to the domain.

Tools menu:

Mail Log Cache

The mail log is kept in a cache and gets written into the Riak database every 5min. This menu shows the current content of the cache.

Analyzer

This is a simple log analyzer. It reads the mail log from the Riak database and shows the log entries and a graph of the received entries. Set the start and end date and time and click refresh. You can also filter what shows up on the grid by entering regular expressions in the filter fields and pressing the refresh button. The checkbox next to the filter field groups by that field (similar to group by in SQL). The graph shows the first 5 groups if you group by a field (actually you can group by several fields at the same time).

example:

filter the sender field : [email protected]
filter the recipient field : gmail.com
group by type (this is the log entry type: queued, sent, softbounced, etc.)
after a refresh you will see the log entries, a grid with the counts for all the groups and the graphs for the first 5 groups
(graphs for queued, sent, softbounced, hardbounced, deleted emails)