What are notqmail's goals?

We'll trade away other things to get these.

We prioritize:

• Preserving qmail's hard-earned security properties
• Implementing new features (or alternatives to core components) as "extensions"
• Adding interfaces and seams, where needed, to make extensions possible
• Encouraging multiple initial implementations of X, for any X
• Following consensus, merging the best aspects into one implementation
• Providing sensible defaults and easily configured runtime options
• Providing a safe update path for qmail and netqmail users
• Providing safe, easy, regular updates for notqmail users
• Gradually reducing the marginal cost of developing notqmail
• Being easily packaged by OS integrators
• Meeting all common needs with OS-provided packages
• Earning community trust as the authoritative open-source successor to qmail and netqmail

What are notqmail's non-goals?

We'll trade very little of these to get other things.

We wish to avoid:

• Breaking compatibility
• Breaking existing features of the architecture
• Breaking your patches more than necessary
• Modifying or replacing core components

Given the reasons qmail is valuable to us, the cost of a change that exhibits any of the preceding non-goals is high. Proposing one such change will require unusually strong justification, documentation, testing, and design. For the community to accept such a change, the risk must be demonstrably very low and the benefit very high.