I still think that mail servers could really use a disruption. It is still way too complex just to get something simple set up.

I haven't surveyed the field extensively but this has been my experience with the common recommendations. If anyone knows of a server that already exists and would make it trivial to set up basic SMTP/IMAP/POP3 with authentication let me know.

Ideally the only configuration info I would need would be something like this:

allow_imap = True

allow_pop3 = True

allow_smtp = True

accept_mail_for = ['this_domain.com', 'another_domain.com']

#users

users = ['jeff@this_domain.com', 'molly@another_domain.com']

#forwards

forwards = {'jeff@this_domain.com': 'cookiecaper@some_domain.com'}

and then, a program like mail_server_passwd would ask me for my username and let me set a password, and that would be that. It shouldn't be any difficult to bootstrap a mail server, and right now setting something that has POP3, IMAP, and SMTP up can take hours for experienced admins unless they know the mail server(s) very well ahead of time.

Keep an eye on OpenSMTPD. For a taste, look at the sample configurations at https://calomel.org/opensmtpd.html.

[Warnings: OpenSMTPD apparently hasn't eaten anyone's mail yet, but it's hardly done. By design, it doesn't include as many options as other mail servers, some of which may be useful. I don't think OpenSMTPD been ported to non-OpenBSD yet. calomel.org tends to be out of date, inaccurate or dangerously incomplete.]

OpenSMTPD comes very close to your ideal simple configuration, a 5 line configuration gets you up and running. Tie this together with openbsd's extremely simple pop3 server, you have something that is both extremely simple and easy to set up.

http:///opensmtpd.org

What about using a ramdisk? Of course, it wont be as optimized since the software thinks it's writing to disk, but..

Also, some SMTP servers are probably pretty easy to modify. I use qpsmtpd[1], which is probably quite easy to modify. Then, all you need is a IMPAD that can read from memory..

I would like to have my mail in something like Redis. It would give easy access from different languages etc..

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qpsmtpd

This is what you're looking for: http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/