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Postfix 2.1 Released
MasTRE writes "After an extended period of polishing and testing, Postfix 2.1 is released. Some highlights: complete documentation rewrite (long overdue!), policy delegation to external code, real-time content filtering _before_ mail is accepted (a top 10 most requested feature in previous versions), major revision of the LDAP/MySQL/PGSQL code. Version 2.2 is in thw works, which promises even more features like client rate limiting and integration of the TLS and IPv6 patches into the official tree. There's never been a better time to migrate from Sendmail (just _had_ to get that in there ;)."
Nowhere did I see:
"-read the changelog notes to see if any of the numerous changes classified as "incompatible" affected me or my users".
Please help metamoderate.
You may or may not be correct in this particular case, but as a general statement, that's just stupid.
Do you really mean that the exact same settings for a little desktop (high priority to input-related tasks, swap only when needed) would work well for a high-load server (high priority to compute-related tasks, swap agressively to make RAM quickly available)? There are a lot of settings on a modern system that just can't be inferred by the system itself. Stating the opposite like it's an obvious fact is ignorant, misleading, or both.
A real-world example: a Usenet spool and an MP3 repository may be the same size, but benefit hugely from tweaked bytes-per-inode or journal settings. In some cases, once the system is running, it's too late to easily change your mind (like bytes-per-inode). In other cases, you can switch at will, but not without unmounting the filesystem (ext3 journaling options). You, as the administrator, make those decisions. Either way, even if the computer were capable of recognizing that you'd made a bad decision, it's not in a position to correct them.
A real-world example: I tuned Sendmail to use delayed sending so that when a client blasted 20,000 copies of a newsletter (yes, opt-in), then it would wait for several minutes so that it could efficiently aggregate recipients by domain. In there situation, telling Sendmail to leave email in the queue for 10 minutes meant a 50% savings in bandwidth. How on earth would you expect a self-tuned MTA to ever make that discovery on its own?
Computers do some things well. Predicting the future usage patterns of their owners without mounds of previous input is not one of them. That's where manual tuning comes in, and why real system administrators still paid decently.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I wonder when people will stop repeating this rubbish. Qt has been GPL'd for years. It is also available under a commercial licence, but that has nothing to do with KDE, it's in case you want to develop a closed-source application with Qt. (And it seems to be an excellent business model.)
As for qmail, you're not allowed to distribute modified versions, and the rules on distributing binaries are rather stringent and almost impossible for distributors to follow. That makes it not quite "free software" (by FSF's definition) or "open source". (However, you're allowed to distribute patches, and even bundle patches with unmodified source in a tarball; you can download one such tarball, called netqmail, from http://www.qmail.org).
Cause Postfix was built for people who do not understand how to properly configure a mailserver. It assumes you are new and keeps it locked down by default. Where sendmail is more customizable and faster (http://www.benchmarks.dmz.ro/article.php?story=20 02081221400018), although Qmail is faster, for standard configurations.. Sendmail is great for large high volume sites, where postfix is great for the home user or smaller sites. Although it can still be used in larger sites.. I personally have been using sendmail for years and cannot remember a security issue that applied to me. Mostly because I know how to configure sendmail and it is very well tuned. I worked with a company that sent stock notifications where we pushed over 5 million messages in under 30 minutes with 8 Sun Netra's with 440 mhz CPU's.. In case you do not get the math that is about 20,833 thousand messages per minute per machine! Running sendmail..
I've been using sendmail for nearly 15 years in some pretty complex environments, and am pretty happy with it. But I have nothing against Postfix either (except it has been lacking features, for me, and sendmail works just grand).
/. readers never use an MTA in anything but the simplest of configurations. Most likely a home computer or a small LAN. Those who have to manage email for large corporations in very complex networks, etc., can appreciate all that raw power and flexibility of sendmail much more. But to most, it seems like an overly complex mess.
I can't quite understand the religous flame wars over MTA choice either. I mean, I can kind of understand the whole emacs vs. vi or gnome vs. KDE. But why fight over MTA's? It seems there is an awful lot of hatred for sendmail, and for no good reason whatsoever. It's just stupid.
I think a lot of it has to do with sendmail having such a long and rich history; anything which has existed for over a decade tends to get a lot of newbie disapproval. Also the configuration can be rather complex, and I think most people who flame about sendmail just don't want to 'fess up to being too dumb to understand it (with my asbestos suit on), and so resort to juvinile name calling.
Also you have to remember that probably 95% or more of the
And about the security-flaw reasoning. That's just an easy way for flammers to badmouth sendmail without really giving true reasons. Any software which has had such a long history and unbiquitous use as sendmail has a history of security flaws. For that matter Unix itself has had an absolutely abismal security record. And yes, someday Postfix will have it's own history to brag about too. But in all cases the flaws were quickly fixed, and the vast majority of flaws required a very specific configuration to even be a problem. Also many security problems result from improper installation; you can run sendmail in a very security setup if you want (just avoid all the FUD about sendmail). You can't compare Postfix and sendmail based solely upon their history of security, because sendmail's history is decades longer than Postfix's. And sendmail has processed perhaps a million trillion times as many email messages as has Postfix over it's lifetime.
Postfix is -not- written in perl. Postfix is written in C. Please, in the future, at least -know- what you are talking about before posting.
Carl P. Corliss
It is not the MTA's (Mail Transfer Agent) job to put the mail on the filesystem, that's the MDA's (Mail Delivery Agent) job. Sendmail is a Mail Transfer Agent. Sendmail, for as long as I've known, as a pluggable MDA format, where you can put in any MDA you choose. You can easily build your own MDA for Sendmail. Not to mention if you use Milter.
This is rudimentary internet mail handling.
For example, I use Cyrus IMAP's MDA with sendmail; and thus sendmail simply hands the Cyrus MDA my mail once sendmail has figured the mail belongs on this server.
Thus in a way, Sendmail, Postix, and all other MTA are essentially routers.
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