Tarmail is a complete SMTP server designed to resist abuse. Unwanted messages are rejected during the SMTP dialogue, instead of afterwards. Tarmail features greylisting, per-user whitelisting, banning by IP, and strict RFC2821 enforcement to screen out abusive senders before the message is accepted. The configuration file is easy to understand and well-documented to help get you up and running right away.

Latest News [2008-05-23]: Tarmail 1.3.4 has been released! This release fixes a handful of bugs that were discovered in 1.3.3. See changelog.txt for the complete list of changes.
Important Note:The command 'make install' will overwrite your existing tarmail configuration files (if any). To keep your configuration, type 'make install-preserve'.

Tarmail is released under the terms of the GPL version 2. You must accept this license agreement before downloading tarmail.

How do you like tarmail? What would you add? What would you change? If you have questions, comments, or something you'd like to suggest, you can e-mail the author at tarmail@ablative.org

What does it do?

With Tarmail, most of the messages you don't want will be denied during the SMTP dialogue, before the sender has a chance to transmit it. This saves you the time and cost of scanning message content that is already known to be bad. Also, if a legitimate sender accidentally gets blocked, he will know that his message was not received and can take appropriate action, instead of his message silently disappearing.

Tarmail is highly configurable, and can accept, reject, or ban as you choose. The default configuration is very tight, with strict enforcement of as many RFC2821 rules as practical. The configuration file has many comments that should help you quickly familiarize yourself with the features, including the following:

• Strict command syntax checking and EHLO validation
• Banning by IP address
• Per-user e-mail address whitelisting and blacklisting
• Dictionary attack mitigation/prevention
• Callback Sender Validation
• Greylisting by IP address
• Support for the SMTP AUTH Extension
• Built-in DNS-RBL support for SpamHaus, SpamCop and others
• Built-in support for the SpamAssassin daemon

Tarmail is released under the terms of the GPL version 2. You must accept this license agreement before downloading tarmail. If you are interested in obtaining Tarmail under a different license, please contact the author at tarmail@ablative.org.

Tarmail is written in C and is designed to be able to run on any platform that properly implements the BSD Sockets interface. The number of dependencies has been minimized as much as possible. The development system is Linux on Intel x86 hardware.

A lot of effort has been made to ensure security by design, eliminate bugs, and carefully track memory use. But this is no guarantee that everything is perfect. If you do find a problem in tarmail, please let me know.

This software is offered AS-IS without warranty of any kind. You use this software at your sole risk and expense. In no event shall the author of this software be liable for any damages.

This page and all works contained therein are Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved.