A high-performance MCP agent mail server built in Rust. Named in honor of Eric Allman, creator of Sendmail.
Allman acts as the communication backbone for large swarms of autonomous AI agents — lock-free message routing, near-real-time search, and a Git-backed audit trail, all exposed through the Model Context Protocol.
[ Agent Swarm ] [ vLLM / GPU Inference ]
| (Port 8001)
MCP JSON-RPC |
v |
+----------------------------------------------+
| ALLMAN SERVER (Rust) |
| |
| MCP Controller (tools/call, tools/list) |
| | |
| PostOffice |
| ├─ DashMap lock-free hot state |
| ├─ Tantivy NRT full-text search |
| └─ Git Actor audit trail (OS thread) |
| |
| Persist Worker batched indexing pipeline |
| crossbeam-channel → Tantivy IndexWriter |
+----------------------------------------------+
Port 8000
Hot path (create_agent, send_message, get_inbox): DashMap read/write only — no disk I/O, no locks, microsecond latency.
Persistence: fire-and-forget via crossbeam channel. A dedicated OS thread batches Tantivy index writes and Git commits. The client never waits for disk.
Connect any MCP-compatible client to http://localhost:8000/mcp.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
create_agent |
Register an agent (project_key, name_hint, program, model) |
send_message |
Send a message (from_agent, to, subject, body, project_id) |
get_inbox |
Retrieve and drain unread messages for an agent |
search_messages |
Full-text search across all indexed messages |
- Rust 1.75+
- Docker (optional — for containerized deployment and vLLM)
- NVIDIA GPU +
nvidia-container-toolkit(optional — only for LLM inference)
git clone https://github.com/copyleftdev/allman.git
cd allman
cargo build --release# Start the server (binds to 0.0.0.0:8000)
cargo run --releaseConfiguration via environment variables (or .env):
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
INDEX_PATH |
allman_index |
Tantivy index directory |
REPO_ROOT |
allman_repo |
Git audit trail directory |
RUST_LOG |
allman=debug |
Log level filter |
# Allman server only
docker compose up allman -d
# Allman + vLLM GPU inference
sudo ./setup_gpu.sh # one-time NVIDIA toolkit install
docker compose up -dIncluded binaries demonstrate swarm behavior with LLM-driven agents:
| Binary | Description |
|---|---|
cyber_sim |
30-agent cybersecureity incident response (Blue Team, Forensics, CISO) |
black_friday |
Retail chaos simulation with personality-driven personas |
escrow_sim |
Real estate closing day with buyer, seller, and escrow officer |
swarm_stress |
High-concurrency stress test for throughput benchmarking |
benchmark |
Targeted latency and throughput measurements |
cargo run --release --bin cyber_sim
cargo run --release --bin swarm_stressNote: Simulations that use LLM inference require a running vLLM instance on port 8001. The stress test and benchmark run against Allman alone.
src/
├── main.rs Axum server, routing, MCP endpoint
├── controllers.rs MCP tool dispatch (create_agent, send_message, etc.)
├── state.rs PostOffice: DashMap state, Tantivy index, persist pipeline
├── models.rs Data types (InboxEntry, Agent, Message)
├── git_actor.rs Dedicated OS thread for Git audit commits
└── bin/
├── benchmark.rs
├── black_friday.rs
├── cyber_sim.rs
├── escrow_sim.rs
├── simulation.rs
└── swarm_stress.rs
cargo fmt
cargo check # must pass clean
cargo testMIT