Alt-Mail is a self-contained program that implements a complete web-based email solution for a small business, organization, or project. Planned features include:

• SMTP email receiver process

• SMTP sendmail process for transmitting email

• Web interface for reading, writing, search, archiving, and managing email

• Web-based administrative interface

• Support for mailing lists

• POP3/IMAP interface for pulling mail down to clients

• Flexible spam-control features

Why Yet Another Email System?

Alt-Mail is intended to help users manage their own email systems, to better take control of their own on-line lives.

Alt-Mail seeks to help users break free of dependence on commercial email providers such as gmail, while still maintaining the ability to use email from any web browser.

Alt-Mail helps users maintain privacy by storing and processing email themselves, on their systems, rather than relying on commercial email providers. Commercial email providers claim that they are not reading your email, but not everybody believes those claims.

Alt-Mail provides access to uncensored and unmonitored email from behind a restrictive firewall, such as within China.

Alt-Mail is designed to be simple to install, simple to operate, simple to manage, and simple to customize. A full implementation of Alt-Mail can be set up in under 20 minutes on a $5/month virtual machine, on a Raspberry-PI, or on any similar minimal computing platform.

Alt-Mail is a single self-contained executable that is easy to install (just copy the binary to /usr/bin), uninstall (delete the binary), or upgrade (overwrite the binary with a new version).

Core Technologies

• Programmed in C and in Tcl

• Extensive use of SQLite

• Web interface using Wapp

• Version control using Fossil

• Designed to run on unix servers. This is a server-side technology and so there are no plans to support Windows.

Status

Alt-Mail is not working yet. This website, and this domain name, exist purely as a test-platform for Alt-Mail. A public announcement will be made, and this status line will be updated, as soon as a minimum viable product has been achieved.