In development
One mail platform that filters, hosts, sends, and routes.
MXPenguin explains every decision it makes. A sensible alternative to AWS SES and SpamTitan.
Where it stands
In development. Early MVP. Not for production use yet.
Built means it works in a development environment. It does not mean it has handled real mail. These lists come from our project tracker.
Built
- Receiving, queueing, and delivery
- An SMTP receiver that stores each message durably before it acknowledges it.
- A queue with retries, relay delivery, and bounce generation.
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks on inbound mail.
- Filtering
- A staged filter pipeline with rate limits, DNS blocklists, reverse DNS checks, and greylisting.
- Adapters for Rspamd and ClamAV.
- Recipient checks against Google, Microsoft, LDAP, and SCIM directories.
- Quarantine with digest emails.
- Lookalike-domain and impersonation detection, and URL rewriting with click-time checks.
- Relay to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
- Filter mail, then relay it onward with ARC and loop prevention.
- A smarthost mode for Google, Microsoft, and internal systems.
- Policy and explanation
- Policies written as code in CEL, with lint and test commands.
- A new policy can be replayed against historical traffic, then rolled out in stages with signed bundles.
- Every message gets a per-stage trace, and the trace view shows what would have changed the outcome.
- A mail flow simulator, and a shadow mode that compares verdicts with your current gateway.
- Sending
- Tenants, projects, and service accounts, with API keys and SMTP credentials.
- Authenticated SMTP submission and a REST send API with idempotency and batch sending.
- Per-domain DKIM with automated key rotation.
- Sending domains, templates, signed webhooks, open and click tracking, quotas, and one-click unsubscribe.
- Deliverability controls
- IP pools, outbound routing, and IP warm-up.
- Per-provider throttling and retry policies.
- Reputation scoring with automatic protection.
- Bounce handling and suppression lists.
- Routing through upstream relays such as SES, SendGrid, and Mailgun.
- Detection of unusual outbound volume, with automatic throttling of compromised accounts.
- Mail hosting
- Mailboxes with quotas, deduplication, compression, full-text search, and encryption at rest.
- Sign-in with passwords, app passwords, TOTP, WebAuthn, OIDC, or LDAP.
- Sieve filters, aliases, shared mailboxes, delegation, vacation replies, and forwarding.
- JMAP, and POP3 if you turn it on.
- Admin console and operations
- A web console with message trace, quarantine, a policy workbench, and sending dashboards.
- A cutover wizard with DNS health monitoring.
- Multiple tenants with roles, single sign-on over OIDC and SAML, and MSP branding.
- Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics, Grafana dashboards, and alert rules.
- A local dev mode that catches mail in a sink.
- Compatibility, identity, and extras
- An API and SMTP interface modeled on SES.
- Importers for SES, ZeptoMail, Barracuda ESG, SpamTitan, and Postfix and Exim maps.
- Keyless workload identity, inbound routes and parsing for applications, and optional address verification.
- An S/MIME and PGP gateway and a DMARC report analyzer.
- An optional local classifier that stays off unless you enable it.
Being built now
- IMAP server and mailbox migration
- An IMAP server (IMAP4rev2, TLS only).
- Importers that copy mailboxes over IMAP or through the Google and Microsoft 365 APIs.
- Clawback and attachment analysis
- Pulling a delivered message back through the Gmail API and Microsoft Graph.
- Report-phish add-ins for Outlook and Gmail.
- Attachment analysis with YARA rules, macro and QR code detection, and optional sandbox detonation.
- Admin API, automation, and plugins
- An admin REST and gRPC API with an OpenAPI spec.
- DNS provider automation for Cloudflare, Route 53, Google, Azure, and RFC 2136.
- A Terraform provider and a Kubernetes operator.
- A WASM plugin runtime with SDKs.
- Provider feedback and API compatibility
- Feedback loops and Postmaster integrations, including Google Postmaster Tools.
- A ZeptoMail-style send endpoint for single and batch sends.
- Compliance and transport security
- Journaling, a WORM archive, legal hold, and eDiscovery export.
- A DLP engine for inbound, outbound, and API mail.
- MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, and DANE.
- Hardening, scale, and testing
- Sandbox mode for new accounts, revocation of leaked keys, and abuse controls.
- High-availability clustering with queue replication.
- Interop, fuzzing, chaos, load, and deliverability testing.
- A threat model, privilege separation, and supply-chain controls.
- Documentation, runbooks, and migration guides.
Not started
- Kafka export for events
- Webhooks and other event export sinks are built.
- A Kafka sink has not been started.
Not verified against real systems
MXPenguin has not been run against these yet.
- Container-based integration tests
- Delivery to Google and Microsoft
- Real MX traffic
- Real relay vendors
Four jobs, one core.
Email security gateway
Filters mail, then delivers it to a local mailbox or relays it to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. An alternative to appliance-style gateways.
Mail host
An MTA with IMAP and JMAP mailboxes.
Sending platform
Service accounts, API and SMTP sending, deliverability, and events. An alternative to hosted sending services.
Inbound routing
Receives and parses inbound mail so applications can act on it.
What it is designed to do.
These are design goals. What works today is listed under Where it stands.
- Explainable decisions
- Each decision shows which rule fired and what would have changed the outcome.
- Policy as code
- Rules live in files. A new policy can be replayed against historical traffic before it goes live.
- Shadow mode and importers
- Run beside your current setup and compare results before you switch. Importers bring existing configuration across.
- Post-delivery clawback
- Pull a message back from mailboxes after delivery when a verdict changes.
- Keyless workload identity
- Services prove who they are without long-lived keys.
- WASM plugins
- Extend filtering with sandboxed WebAssembly plugins.
- Optional local AI
- Models, if you want them, run on your own hardware.
- No phone-home
- Nothing is reported back to us.
