Beyond the prototype: next steps

Sam Tuke Feb 19 2020 Share

Wow. Over 1,000 downloads in three days. Over 200 companies on the waiting list. Extensive press coverage. The first Open Source contribution merged. The Lightmeter Open Source email delivery monitoring app has truly lifted off!

Between November and February a lot of work went into the Lightmeter Control Center Prototype which was launched last month. Written in the R statistical programming language, it provides deliverability monitoring for Postfix Mailservers.

Beyond being a useful tool in itself, the goal of this prototype was to:

1. Demonstrate the value of delivery status monitoring
2. Indicate how much need there is for such a solution, and
3. Provide an opportunity to gather feedback on user needs and priorities

Thanks to your interest and support, these goals were achieved beyond all expectations!

With the concept validated, it’s time to push ahead with improving Lightmeter’s functionality and features; an exciting road lays ahead of us.

This last week we’ve been working on getting the feature backlog and application architecture organised for the next phase of development (managed and documented via public GitLab repositories).

Here’s a taste of improvements on the roadmap:

• Notification system for delivery issues
• Actionable insights for detected problems
• All new web interface design
• Support for multi-mail-server networks

Rudolf, Lightmeter’s Designer, is now hard at work on drafting concepts for the new web interface (expect previews of that soon), and Leandro, Lightmeter’s Lead Developer is devising protocols by which components of the new application architecture will communicate.

As work begins on a more portable, more flexible, and more powerful Lightmeter Control Center, our team here at Lightmeter HQ will refrain from further updates to the existing prototype, in order to focus on achieving the aforementioned milestones as soon as possible.

Meanwhile the prototype lives on in it’s repository on GitLab, separate from components of the new Lightmeter architecture, which reside within their own repository. Contributions there are still welcome and we’ll continue to review and merge them.