A Conversation With Tom Mairs and Mike Hillyer of KumoMTA

The Future of Email

Ever make a connecting flight through Atlanta - Hartsfield? While it’s the busiest airport in the US, moving between flights is easier than in most airports. There’s a fascinating analysis about why Hartsfield works well, based on the (proposed) constructal law of physics.

That’s not what this episode of the Future Of Email is about, but it’s close!

An email MTA – Message Transfer Agent — does some of the same jobs as an airport. MTAs hand off email messages — to mail delivery agents (think Gmail), or possibly to other MTAs in between. At scale, a busy MTA could be juggling a million email messages. Like a million cranky fliers at Hartsfield, each message could have its own complications. Flight delays = slow domain lookup. Address not found = lost my ticket. You get the idea.

KumoMTA is a new open-source MTA, created by 3 founders with incredibly deep experience in the world of email. Two of the founders, Tom Mairs and Mike Hillyer, joined host Matthew Dunn for a Future Of Email conversation about MTAs, open-source, founding companies, creating niches, finding traction, the virtues of Rust and scriptability, and quite a few more topics. Actually, the conversation was as busy as Hartsfield on a Friday!

It’s easy to take email for granted, whether you just get too much of it or you’re professionally responsible for that. This is a great conversational glimpse into the sheer complexity involved in making a Hartsfield-for-email work well, at scale — and at the surprisingly calm, smart business model to releasing the code that does that job for free, as open-source software. A super (and technically deep) conversation — stay tuned for a followup in a year!