About
Atmosphere Mail is a cooperative SMTP relay for atproto identities. It lets small senders get their transactional mail past Gmail's reputation filters without paying enterprise SaaS prices or handing over their identity to a third-party provider.
The person behind this
Atmosphere Mail is built and operated by @scottlanoue.com — a Washington-based software developer working on open-source infrastructure for the atproto ecosystem.
Freedom in software comes from open source and shared tooling. atproto already provides the portable identity primitive that other protocols still lack; email just needed the plumbing to route around the reputation bottleneck. The relay is MIT-licensed, the Osprey rules live in the open, and the labeler feed is public, so anyone with the source can audit how deliverability decisions are made.
Who's on the contract
The relay is operated by Atmosphere Mail LLC, a Washington State limited liability company formed in 2026 to give the project a stable legal counterparty. The LLC exists to sign agreements, hold infrastructure, and absorb liability on behalf of the cooperative — it does not operate for profit.
Architecture
Domain ownership is verified via DNS TXT record — the same primitive used by Let's Encrypt and Google Workspace. Each enrolled domain is issued a DKIM keypair (RSA and Ed25519) whose public keys you publish in DNS. The relay signs outbound mail on your behalf, tracks delivery and bounce outcomes, and emits those events to a Trust & Safety rules engine (Osprey) that labels reputation via an atproto labeler. Labels drive throttling, warming, and suspension decisions.
Open, auditable
The relay, admin UI, Osprey rules, and labeler code all live at tangled.org/scottlanoue.com/atmosphere-mail. Bug reports and patches welcome.
Reach us
Operational questions: postmaster@atmos.email. Abuse reports: abuse@atmos.email.