Postfix
Postfix is an attempt to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and hopefully secure, while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset your users.
| Tags | Communications Email Mail Transport Agents |
|---|---|
| Licenses | IBM Public |
Recent releases
- 04 Jun 2009 13:55
Changes: This stable release fixes a defect in SASL support. With plaintext SMTP sessions and smtpd_tls_auth_only=yes and smtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes, the SMTP server logged warnings for reject_*_sender_login_mismatch, instead of enforcing them.
- 25 May 2009 12:53
Changes: This stable release fixes one defect in Milter support.
- 18 May 2009 07:39
Changes: The installation/upgrade procedure did not automatically create the data_directory. In the "new queue manager", the _destination_rate_delay code needed to postpone the job scheduler updates after delivery completion, otherwise the scheduler could loop on blocked jobs. The queue manager used <transport>_concurrency_failed_cohort_limit instead of <transport>_destination_concurrency_failed_cohort_limit as documented. The SMTP client disabled MIME parsing despite non-empty settings for smtp_header_checks, smtp_mime_header_checks, smtp_nested_header_checks, or smtp_body_checks.
- 18 May 2009 07:35
Changes: This version introduces multi-instance support. TLS (SSL) support was updated for elliptic curve encryption. The Milter client now supports all Sendmail 8.14 Milter requests. Postfix no longer adds (Resent-) From:, Date:, Message-ID:, or To: headers to email messages with "remote" origins. Stress-adaptive behavior is now enabled by default. This allows the Postfix SMTP server to temporarily reduce time limits and error-count limits under conditions of overload, such as a malware attack or backscatter flood.
- 05 Jan 2009 08:30
Changes: Reduced TCP performance is avoided when reusing an SMTP connection with a larger than 4096-byte TCP MSS value. The cleanup server did not update the queue file's recipient count field after a Milter application added or deleted a recipient.
- All comments
Recent commentsSome thoughts on Postfix
Let me get the negatives out of the way FIRST.
1) License sucks. Why couldn't IBM have released this under one of the big licenses like BSD or GPL? If this had been BSD licensed, we'd probably see it overtake Sendmail by now (even in Linux distros).
2) Back end database support. It's been a bit lacking. My understanding from the mailing list archives is that the maintainers are putting security, performance & stability over features. This is a noble cause which I am hesitant to criticize. But as a Postfix user I sometimes feel as if it would better serve me with more flexible back end options.
Stuff I like:
1) Easy to set up. It has a big config file, but it is in plain english and well commented. You don't have to read a book before setting it up.
2) Drop-in replacement for Sendmail. It replaces the command-line sendmail utilities and everything.
3) Secure. You hardly ever hear anything about Postfix vulnerabilities on Bugtraq.
4) Fast. I've set up some large mailing list servers on Postfix and it just rrrrrips.
Overall I give it an 8 out of 10. The license bugs me but there is not a lot that can be done about that now, at least not by the Postfix maintainers (but IBM could retroactively re-release their code under BSD or GPL and Postfix could opt to relicense their copious additions). There isn't a lot of push for this so I won't hold my breath.
Great
Forget sendmail, install Postfix - real-drop-in-replacement, nice configruation, fast, reliable - perfect
Postfix
I've been using it since the Postfix 19990317 release and I've never had any trouble with it. Drop in replacement for sendmail that doesn't require aspirin to configure. And performance is *great*, too.
I'm impressed
And that takes a lot! I tried Postfix after hearing good reports and first impressions are that it's a superb mail server, I managed to make a complete mirror image of my existing sendmail setup in a couple of hours from first downloading it. Looking forward to seeing how well it performs when I start hammering it :-) Thanks!
postfix is very good
Ok, with the world writable directory fixed postfix became
a very good MTA. Eventually I got rid of qmail and installed
postfix after several people told me it's fast and reliable.
It even supports MySQL database lookups now and other advanced
stuff and the IBM license it's distributed under is surprisingly
liberal. Postfix has also made it into Debian/Potato. Thanx
again Wietse.