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
- 15 Jun 2010 06:24
Changes: A problem where the Postfix SMTP client did not skip "unknown" SMTP client attributes, causing a syntax error when sending an "unknown" client PORT attribute was fixed. Postfix will now skip LDAP queries with non-ASCII search strings, instead of failing with a database lookup error. A warning is now logged when a matchlist has a #comment at the end of a line (for example mynetworks or relay_domains).
- 15 Jun 2010 06:24
Changes: A problem where the Postfix SMTP client did not skip "unknown" SMTP client attributes, causing a syntax error when sending an "unknown" client PORT attribute was fixed. Postfix will now skip LDAP queries with non-ASCII search strings, instead of failing with a database lookup error.
- 24 Mar 2010 10:33
Changes: This version fixes problems such as a milter application hang, a core dump related to malformed error messages in LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL lookup table configurations, a stuck-in-queue problem for mail with zero recipients, invalid host rejections for hostnames such as 1-2-3-4, and a problem with the VRFY command.
- 24 Mar 2010 10:33
Changes: This version fixes problems such as a milter application hang, a core dump related to malformed error messages in LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL lookup table configurations, a stuck-in-queue problem for mail with zero recipients, invalid host rejections for hostnames such as 1-2-3-4, and a problem with the VRFY command.
- 24 Mar 2010 10:33
Changes: This version fixes problems with running multiple instances, a milter application hang, a core dump related to malformed error messages in LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL lookup table configurations, a stuck-in-queue problem for mail with zero recipients, invalid host rejections for hostnames such as 1-2-3-4, and a problem with the VRFY command. The address_verify_poll_count was made stress-dependent by default.
not-available
14 Dec 1998 07:44
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- Popularity Score
- 1,310.42
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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.