This might be shocking, but this post is actually not about coffee.

It's been a long time in the making, and it's still far from finished, but much of the work to get a first release is now done. Amazing that this little project is already two years old and has already undergone the odd rewrite.

What am I talking about you might ask? Right. The mokeladmin. Currently, it's an application to manage mail accounts (smtp/imap/pop3), aliases/forwards and xmpp/jabber accounts. It has a web frontend for admins, written with the incredible django framework. The basic features currently implemented are:

• one account for everything: smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
• per-account settings for smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
• flexible layout of the users' maildirs
• migration script for the old version of this (yeah, like anybody but me cares)
• doesn't require postfix to store all mail under the same UID/GID
• features an ejabberd extauth authentication script
• no backend servers need database access; all they see are files
• generation of all the necessary maps

And probably many things I've forgotten.

The minimum requirements are a sane admin who knows what he/she's doing. Seriously. We support postfix and dovecot and ejabberd. Definitely planned for the near future are:

• handling of multiple different backend (postfix or dovecot or ejabberd) servers
• communication (for map exchange) between that servers per http, but gpg secured (yeah, this is a big one)
• an interface for the joe user to manage his/her accounts
• adding support for tinydns, including generating all kind of SRV and other records
• reactivating support for powerdns. It's there in the tree, but doesn't really work and I havend worked in in ages, the code is from an old version

Why am I making this public? Well, currently, it only runs on one server (this), but it needs more work and it has potential. I just wanted to have this out of the bzr repository into the public. If you, dear reader, really want to try it out, the code lives in the bzr branch

which you can checkout with if you happen to have a recent version of bzr installed. Yeah, the little documentation that's there is out of date (you guess). Setting up the web frontend is the easy part (go over to the django tutorial for info on that), wiring everything with the respective server software is the hard part and needs to be done quite manually and is the main reason why this requires an admin and is completely uninteresting for anybody else (I think). Oh and you need the newforms-admin-branch of django, which will eventually get merged to the main developement branch which will eventually result in a 1.0 version near the end of this year. If you like python and what we've written here so far, feel free to contact me (or send patches). I especially welcome input on that gpg-encrypted-maps-over-http-part.

Thanks Jan for writing the powerdns part, we will get that working again eventually. Thanks to jcs for the hours of SQL-juggling with the old version and the help with rewrite and the web fronted. Thanks to Ingo for the visual inspirations!