[HN Gopher] Postfix 25 years old today
___________________________________________________________________
Postfix 25 years old today
Author : sillystuff
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-12-14 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marc.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (marc.info)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Thank you for all of the great software!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The mentioned New York Times article that "that brought open
| source on the radar of the CEO".
|
| _Sharing Software, IBM to Release Mail Program Blueprint. John
| Markoff. December 14, 1998._
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/...
| mrpippy wrote:
| I love that "source code" was apparently too arcane a phrase to
| appear in the New York Times, so they describe it as "original
| programmer's instructions"
| reddalo wrote:
| Very interesting! It could've also been a choice made not to
| repeat "code" which already appeared in the "open source"
| expression.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It's a nice piece of software, switched to postfix from the grand
| old daddy of all, sendmail a decade ago. Haven't looked back
| since.
| spapas82 wrote:
| It seems that almost everybody is using postfix these days... Is
| anybody actually using sendmail? Are actually any reasons for
| using it (beyond the expertise/preferences of administrators)?
| koito17 wrote:
| > Is anybody actually using sendmail?
|
| Not sure if this counts to you, but I believe FreeBSD still
| ships with functioning mail out of the box, and they use
| sendmail. On FreeBSD 12 at least, sudo actually reports
| incidents to root's mailbox :)
|
| With that said, when I was engaged with the FreeBSD community
| years ago, there would be periodic bursts of drama over
| "debloating" the base install, and sendmail was one (of
| several) programs people wanted to remove in order to "debloat"
| the base install. So I wouldn't be surprised if the latest
| version no longer has functioning mail, let alone sendmail
| installed.
| 1over137 wrote:
| I believe FreeBSD 14 just changed the default from sendmail
| to dma:
|
| https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/
| koito17 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. In the release notes, I see
|
| > sendmail(8) and its configuration remain available.
|
| I assume this means sendmail still exists in base installs.
| Do you know the rationale behind this decision? Upgrading
| from FreeBSD 13 shouldn't result in the binary suddenly
| going away, so I want to believe there are no backwards
| compatibility concerns with simply replacing sendmail with
| dma.
| kiney wrote:
| last time I've seen sendmail in production was at a job back in
| 2014
| palata wrote:
| When I use `git send-email`, I believe it uses sendmail,
| doesn't it? Also when I installed OpenSMTPD, it overwrote
| sendmail. I believe `msmtp` also uses sendmail ("SMTP client
| with a sendmail compatible interface").
|
| Or did I misunderstand the question? I thought sendmail was
| basically just an interface.
| juped wrote:
| Yeah, you misunderstood the question; sendmail refers a
| specific piece of software and source of a lot of sysadmin
| trauma.
| ibotty wrote:
| sendmail is both, a commandline client (interface, because
| it's implemented by multiple projects) that sends mail from
| the local machine, as well as a full-blown MTA (smtp server,
| as in postfix).
| sbuk wrote:
| Proofpoint bought them in 2013, and I imagine that they use it
| in some fashion, so a significant volume of mail may well be
| handled by it daily.
| adambb wrote:
| Always thought QMail was the best option back when Postfix came
| out, but it certainly has won the top spot over time.
| justinator wrote:
| Well that's what happens when you don't ever update the app
| because you've decided that it's absolutely perfect.
| kiney wrote:
| the problem of qmail is it's author DJB. He considered it
| 'done' which obviously isn't true. There are quite a few
| patched versions around but no fork got enough traction to
| become a living and maintained project.
| bsdmeister wrote:
| Good memories - mostly. Used extensively Postfix between
| 2003-2011 when worked on ISPs. Back then our Postfix servers
| handled around 150 Million Mails per month, we had very few
| issues, mostly related to integrations with other tools like
| spamassassin and database mailbox auth.
| ipython wrote:
| Wow. I had used Postfix back in the day for our mail exchange
| gateways, but had no idea that it originated from IBM. Postfix
| was a great piece of software- did one thing, did it well, was
| easy to configure and manage, and was secure to boot.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-14 23:00 UTC)