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Postfix's Wietse Venema Interviewed

Posted by timothy on from the better-than-the-usps dept.

wrochal points to Brazilian site Linux IT's interview with Postfix creator Wietse Venema, writing "This interview approaches his private life, projects and the future of postfix and other MTAs."

12 comments

  1. FreeBSD by thefatz · · Score: 1

    Wietse in his own words = FreeBSD rocks.

    Thanks Wietse, I enjoy the pleasure of installing postfix from ports. Your team has created a fine peice of software that like my choice operating system, just does it's job.

    Thanks again!

    --
    http://www.freebsd.org
  2. brother by terrymaster69 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does he have a brother named Goatse? /kidding...

    1. Re:brother by Scaba · · Score: 1

      Goatse Venema - now that's funny.

  3. Sendmail support in the year 2468 by mailman-zero · · Score: 2, Funny
    Indeed, one takes a grave responsibility when implementing yet another mail system. It adds to the burden of system administrators world-wide who have to care and feed the system until the end of time.
    I guess that explains why people still use Sendmail.
    --
    Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
  4. Most evolved MTA by r7 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You have to admire a guy like Weitse, who dreamed about a well designed MTA and made it happen, even made a career out of it. He didn't resort to anti-competitive BS like MS or keep portions of it closed-source like McNealy.

    What came out of the Postfix project is an MTA that is so far ahead of the competition, in every respect, that sendmail gurus are becoming as irrelevant as their cobol counterparts. Even a brief comparison between Postfix source and Sendmail or other MTA's is enough to see the huge difference in the quality, object oriented design, and overall organization. Postfix' best aspect, however, is the administrative time it saves over sendmail, exchange, etc.

    It is interesting, however, how a superior piece of software like Postfix illustrates the legacy-limited aspects of Unix and Linux, most distributions of which are still mired in their sendmail mc-m4-cf sendmail hells. To be sure sendmail was great in it's time, but postfix is the future.

    r7

    1. Re:Most evolved MTA by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I have had the "privilege" of working with Sendmail. It is indeed a nightmare to work with especially for newcomers.

      However, like MySQL vs PostGRE, even though PostGRE is by far the best DB system out there (at least in my opinion), people are reluctant to change from using MySQL, even with licensing issues. This is because the system works and they feel no need, no pressure to change the status quo, in case things fail. This "if it aint broke, don't fix it" attitude will ensure that Sendmail, even with all its complexities, will be a, if not the, major player in the MTA market.

      Software inertia exists until and unless there is a major reason to shift positions. IE is losing ground because of public notification of its fallacies. There is a shift to .NET and Java, even though C and C++ are still extremely relevant, and this is due to the features offered by the two languages, for both developers and users.

      Postfix may yet be the MTA of choice across *nix systems, but if and only if there is a force driving this change.

    2. Re:Most evolved MTA by Earlybird · · Score: 1

      What's this PostGRE thing you're talking about? It's called (and spelled) PostgreSQL.

    3. Re:Most evolved MTA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      IE is losing ground because of public notification of its fallacies.


      So I guess you missed the public notifications of sendmails fallacies ;)

      I've experience of Postfix, sendmail, and qmail. There is no comparison, Postfix rocks.

      It is funny Qmail gets all the attention because of some naff security guarantee, when few serious mail installations can even use it without major 3rd party patches.

      I fear Wietse's big mistake is to market it like IBM marketed OS2.

      Warm greasy dead chicken anyone?
  5. Postfix rocks by ajayrockrock · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm sure this going to get lost in the flurry of praise for Postfix but it has to be said.

    I started out using sendmail on redhat and hosestly, not knowing much about how email works. When I switched to postfix, I learned A LOT about how email works and how a dozen programs all fit together to make it work. And at the center, is Postfix.

    It truely is one of the reasons that UNIX is so great. It's just an MTA but it provides the glue to make a full mail system that rivals some of the best proprietary systems out there.

    --Ajay

  6. dear god by BortQ · · Score: 1

    Note to the interviewers: Put your questions in bold! This way it is easy to tell who is saying what and how long each answer is.

    --

    A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
    1. Re:dear god by wrochal · · Score: 1

      Hello, Thanks for tip...

      --
      William da Rocha Lima - A.k.A wrochal http://www.linuxit.com.br http://blog.linuxit.com.br
  7. From a software developers point of view... by andawyr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...I would highly recommend taking some time and reading the postfix code, especially if you're considering constructing software using a client-server model. The code is very clean, well written, and quite easy to understand.

    The code is very object-oriented, even tho it was written in 'C'. The process framework taught me a *lot* about how you develop multi-process applications - combined with APUE (Richard Stevens' book(s)) Postfix can be a great learning tool.

    Regarding the MTA itself, I installed it about 4 years ago, and except for minor patch upgrades every now and then, I have had no issues with Postfix at all. Granted, I'm not dumping a lot of mail into it, but still - it's quite simple to configure, and you can even understand the configuration file, unlike Sendmail....