I've used a sendmail / IMAP setup for this before. It's an excellent way of providing a persistent distributed routable queuing architecture, with a well known and documented API for handling complex messaging. A lot of people give you quizzical looks when you explain to them how to set this sort of thing up, but then again, it's how "job queuing" is done if the endpoints are people, so why wouldn't it scale splendidly to programs? Assign different processes different email addresses, write a procmail file writer to help you do load balancing if need be accross a cluster Built right in you get point to point and message list distribution, even request receipts and complex attachment hierarchies if you so chose :) It's my favorite solution to this particular problem.