Aspirin Is Moving

[EDIT] Aspirin was a great idea, but spam has ruined email sending. These days, there are very few situations where an email sent via a home computer will ever reach its destination. It will be considered spam, because of its source.

Aspirin is an embeddable Java SMTP server, that’s been fairly well received. This is just an announcement of its new home and a notable change to the codebase.* There’s been a lingering threading bug with it which resulted in the only way to kill it being to use a System.exit() call.

In an attempt to clean up the codebase, and make it easier for developers like you to work on it, and pass back any interesting patches you’ve made, I’ve taken two notable steps:

The first is that I’ve converted Aspirin into a single threaded beast. Throw what you want in it’s queue and it’ll churn its way through it in a background thread which will go away when it’s done. No more thread pool. So far I’ve just made an initial pass at it. While it should be functional it definitely needs more testing and should be considered alpha.

Secondly, I’ve moved all development over to GitHub. This is where you’ll find the new single-threaded version. I’ve done this because git allows you to make as many changes to it as you want with all the benefits of version control, and without me having to allow any random Joe to commit to the master repo. However, I would be more than happy to accept essentially any patch you feel like pushing back (incredibly easy on GitHub).

I’ve got no real agenda for Aspirin. I want it to be small, easy to use, and trustworthy. If you have a one line fix, or tweak send it in. If you have a new feature you’ve added to your copy (big or small) send it in. If you reorganized the code in your copy to be more readable, send it in. Almost anything you send it will be accepted into the main repo, I just want to give it a once-over to make sure it’s not going to harm anthing, and that it actually benefits something.

The url for Aspirin on GitHub is here http://github.com/masukomi/aspirin

On a related note, I’m planning on making a fork of Aspirin that’s tailored to working on Android. Because there really needs to be a way to send e-mail without having to display an editable e-mail message to the user.

The plan is to hook into the same sending mechanisms that the Gmail app uses, and have e-mails send out silently but be visible in the users sent-mail folder. If you’re interested in such a beast, drop me a note and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop. * Unfortunately dev.java.net gives me no good tools for contacting the “observers” on the project. WTF is the point of letting people sign up as observers (or developers, or anything else) if you can’t communicate with them except via a mailing list they may not be on?! I so regret putting aspirin on that site.