Sendmail Meets Erlang: Experiences Using Erlang for Email Applications

Our software engineering team needed to create a system that moves data from a set of legacy applications with diverse properties to data repositories scattered around the network. This system had to be highly concurrent, straightforward to extend, have high performance, and be coded rapidly by a small development sta. Because of these requirements, the authors embarked upon an experiment to write this application in Erlang. This paper describes what we did, why we did it, and what we learned over the course of our development eort. It is our hope that this chronicle may be useful to others thinking about coding in Erlang for the first time and to the incumbent Erlang community to hear an outsider’s perspective on this fine language.