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Why Postfix is called Postfix and IBM secure mailer

80 points| gurrone | 3 years ago |marc.info

24 comments

order

_nickwhite|3 years ago

How many greybeards here remember the O'reilly Sendmail bat book[1]? I built an ISP off of deciphering cryptic sendmail.cf parameters from it. This is what the "fix" in Postfix aims to "fix".

(Although the Postfix config files are no walk in the park either.)

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sendmail-4th-edition/97...

slillibri|3 years ago

But you don’t need to know cryptic sendmail.cf parameters, you can just use m4 macros which are totally not cryptic at all.

geocrasher|3 years ago

A neat bit of history. Just the name Postfix has always conjured up in mind that it was fixing a problem. And anybody who's ever used Sendmail knows which problem it was fixing :D There's also qmail, but we don't discuss that in good company.

Spooky23|3 years ago

This was a thing at IBM at that time. I remember eyerolling at a new employer where we per paying a few thousand dollars per server from "IBM-SSH".

IBM-SSH consistent of some IBM guy replacing every instance of "OpenSSH" with "IBM-SSH". One of the interns noticed with one release the find replace hit the man pages.

smcl|3 years ago

> "post" was a different word for "mail",

this is clear

> and "fix" was for Sendmail

this is unclear. I don't know how you get "fix" from "Sendmail"

Bootvis|3 years ago

Sendmail was the problem, Postfix was the fix.

tyingq|3 years ago

Interesting contrast where the "post" in Postgres is there for the other meaning of post.

tptacek|3 years ago

It wasn't originally called Postfix; it was VMailer.

ossusermivami|3 years ago

ah the good old days, when a bunch of MTA was coming out (exim, vmail, qmail and postfix) to replace sendmail cf and m4 atrocities.

It's interesting to see that the most popular who came out as "winner" has been postfix,

altho these days most people would setup a relay with msmtp going to a closed source provider than full fledged postfix/cyrus service

kiwijamo|3 years ago

I'm a Postfix guy myself, but I swear I read somewhere that Exim was more popular?

locusofself|3 years ago

Postfix is good software, but I do not miss managing email servers.

2ion|3 years ago

As a hobby mail everything is fun (from MUAs to sieve). If it needs to be reliable it's not. Don't miss self-hosting my email service either ("has the response to my application arrived or did I fail to receive it").