A brief history of a tiny part of the Internet.

Blackhole 1 — Blackhole as it was originally known — was written on Python 2.7, briefly supporting Python 2.6 for a time and also supporting early version of Python 3, PyPy 2 and PyPy 3. Built on top of Tornado, it was asynchronous in a fashion and — quite simply — worked.

The original prototype that became Blackhole was SimpleMTA — a prototype that was created quickly, to serve a very simple testing purpose that I had for it.

As I needed SimpleMTA to do more, I wrote Blackhole to accomplish that task. I’d been using Tornado a bit and wanted to experiment with it more. Building on top of Tornado created some oddities in how the program was designed and that always irked me.

Between the time of the last 1.8.X and the 2.0 release, I experimented with …