So last night I reread the documentation on distributed processing for Erlang. The disturbing part is that is started to make sense.
So I thought about it for a while and I decided to give myself the weekend to rework the application to use distributed processing. I just finished it about an hour ago … a whole day early.
In practice it didn’t work exactly how I was thinking it would, but the documentation was right, I was just reading it wrong. Or rather their assumptions about what I knew did not watch up to my assumptions about what they were saying ….
If fact it was much easier then I was trying to make it out to be. I decided not to distribute one of my processes, as it seemed safer not to. I’m not worried about much, but I do worry about loosing mail message entirely 
So right now my test system has one server and two helpers. I’ve managed to get a total of eleven Erlang nodes to talk to each other at once with my existing hardware.
So now tomorrow, I’m starting the anti-spam engine