Postfix 161
| Postfix: The Definitive Guide | |
| author | Kyle D. Dent |
| pages | 260 |
| publisher | O'Reilly and Associates |
| rating | 8/10 - Excellent book, a little thin on details in a few places |
| reviewer | Tony Williams |
| ISBN | 0596002122 |
| summary | An excellent guide to installing, configuring and running Postfix |
Fortunately, my first needs were simple and I came to realise that Postfix was a much easier system to install and maintain. Now that my needs are more complex, I was glad when this book hit my desk at exactly the same time as I started upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to OS X Server.
Postfix: The Definitive Guide seems to fit the bill. It is a well-written and well-constructed guide to mail systems in general and Postfix in particular. (Oh, and speaking of definitive, could someone at O'Reilly provide a definitive answer to both reviewers and their own editors as to that colon? This is the second 'Definitive Guide' I've reviewed in as many months, and they are sprinkled with instances of each book's title, sometimes including that colon, sometimes leaving it out.)
The book starts with a good overview of the underlying technology in Chapters 1 and 2. I can't blame Dent for my slight confusion in the section on addresses and headers - having RFC822 superseded by RFC2822 was just a little too much coincidence for this particular "bear of little brain." He then follows it with a chapter discussing Postfix's architecture, important since Postfix uses a much more modular approach than the sendmail monolith, with each part of the mail handling process a different executable and the single queue turned into five.
Once the background is well covered, Dent then gets onto the nitty-gritty of configuring and administering Postfix. He has certainly covered everything I needed, including spam handling, multiple domains, relaying, SASL authentication and using LDAP. Once I'd finished grokking all that, and getting it integrated into my servers, I had a corporate email system up in three sites that replaced and improved upon a couple of thousand dollars worth of proprietary dreck. Happy is an understatement.
Dent's writing is sometimes a little patchy, though never bad. The technical detail does seem overpowering in places, though, and I occasionally found myself reading a section through more than once with a configuration file open in front of me. There are certainly spots where a little more hand holding and care with the writing would have been appreciated. (If you are a little more cognizant of the interstices of mail systems then you may not have the same problem.)
I did, however, appreciate the appendices enormously. The four appendices cover configuration parameters, Postfix commands, installation, and an FAQ. My system came with Postfix compiled and installed just as I required it so I didn't get a chance to thoroughly test out Dent's installation procedure (though it looks good); the other three continue to be useful.
If you want to have a look for yourself, then the usual O'Reilly page is complete with a table of contents and index, but this time no example chapter is provided (how come, O'Reilly?). You can also get an expanded version of the FAQ in Appendix 4 from Dent's website. A better example of Dent's writing style is an excellent article on troubleshooting with Postfix logs at O'Reilly's Onlamp.com.
This is an excellent book, Dent has explained the underlying methodology and use of Postfix well, taken the reader through all aspects of this MTA system and explained both the why and the how. I would recommend this book (and, as a result Postfix) to anyone looking for an MTA and a guide to configuring and running it.
You can purchase Postfix: The Definitive Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Postfix Enabler (Score:5, Informative)
It has some handy instructions for setting up Mac OS X's Mail.app to interface with the Postfix server as well.
Re:Postfix Enabler -- solution for free (Score:4, Informative)
beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:5, Interesting)
CB
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:2)
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:2)
CB
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:3, Informative)
Many years ago I was "vi
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:3, Informative)
Yet another convert. here... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not trolling, really... (Score:4, Interesting)
(while Sendmail config file reminds raw binary, Postfix is all easy, understandable and well commented options)
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:1, Interesting)
I tend to make a ridiculous number of changes to the
editting sendmail.cf (Score:5, Informative)
Postfix seems ok, I'd recommend it for folks setting up straightforward machines who didn't know sendmail
But people whine that "sendmail is too complex" and at the same time they WANT complex things to happen.
I had a guy come up to me at an event and shout:
Guy: Sendmail is too hard.
ok
Guy: and is there any way to make it only send large (> 1MB) messages out after 7PM when my ISDN rates are lower?
sure. 5 lines in your m4 file.
Sendmail.cf is a binary. It is intended to be read and parsed quickly by a binary. Sendmail still runs on 4MB Sun 3 machines. You don't edit /bin/ls to effect a change there, you edit "ls.c". .mc file to effect a change in the .cf.
Similarly, you edit the
More, when sendmail changes major revisions (eg. you fianlly move from Sendmail 8.8 to 8.12), you regen your .cf and, barring some minor changes to remove defunct features or take advantage of new ones, you have a new working .cf file. You can't just move a 8.8 cf file to an 8.12 machine and expect it to work well and use new features.
Having worked on HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of config files (one set went onto 10,000 machines at a site), there's NOTHING you can do in the .cf that can't be done in the .mc.
That said, the rule language is painfully ... complex? No, just the opposite. It's painfully simple. My experience with 6502 assm and a BASIC that had neither ELSE nor AND/OR options helped to make me really good at writing sendmail rules.
Dealing with booleans (just to ruleset^Wsubroutine saving buffer, put time in buffer.
Is message less than 1MB? then return
is time after 1900 hrs? Yes? return dsmtp.
Is time < 700 hrs? Yes? return dsmtp.
Otherwise just return.
In calling routine, look for return value and if it's dsmtp, put the saved buffer to the dsmtp mailer. Otherwise continue with the saved buffer.
Hard? No, not really.
Painful? You betcha. I'd love to have variables and ANDs and ELSEs. I've taken to putting complex logic in a perl milter at the RCPT TO phase and calling it a day.
sub choosemailer {
if ((($time > 1900) || ($time < 700)) && $size > 1MB) THEN $mailer=dsmtp
}
But the rulesets are just read by a parser. It's not rocket science (just computer science).
It would be nice to have (perl) regex's and such built in.
And that's where Postfix starts to have an advantage. I can live without UUCP for that. I'd just hope that new sendmail versions might rethink the whole language for processing mail. It's good to have competition. (qmail2 also looks promising to raise the envelope).
But lets just recall that's its not about Sendmail vs postfix vs exim vs qmail.
It's any of these VS Exchange/Notes/Gropewise. And we're losing.
Re:editting sendmail.cf (Score:2, Informative)
It would be nice to have (perl) regex's and such built in.
Postfix supports PCRE (perl-compatible regular expression) and plain regexps
And that's where Postfix starts to have an advantage. I can live without UUCP for that.
Postfix supports UUCP
Re:editting sendmail.cf (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:editting sendmail.cf (Score:2)
However, I have a $300 box that's 2GHz.
We could afford to move into the future somewhat.
I've had flashbacks to third year CS and writing compilers and languages (in VMS, ick). Basically, you have a special purpose language that your program compiles into something not unique. Perhaps assembly in the end.
I look at sendmail's rule language as a lot like the BASIC I learned on 1970's Wang "PCs". That basic toke
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:5, Funny)
dd if=/dev/random of=./sendmail.cf
then hit Ctrl-C when you think you have enough configuring done. Small installs need about 30 seconds, enterprise installs need a few minuites.
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:1, Interesting)
I do. (Score:1)
Well, yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
...those of us with a very early Slackware box (which came with sendmail but no sendmail docs) didn't know that there was such a thing as the M4 files. We had some helpful comments in the .cf file for what the lines did, but that was it.
When we did find docs, it was just for the .cf file, not the installation-and-regeneration docs. (Which didn't really exist then.)
I became very good at editing sendmail.cf, and then came the day, years later, when I had to do it from absolute scratch, and downloaded t
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a nice, well-written book. It just should have been "Learning Postfix." And then I would have known not to buy it.
"Practical mod_perl" is another misnamed book. It's really "Practical[ly everything you could ever need to know about running an Internet server that happens to have] mod_perl [on it.]" Heck, I bet it'll tell me how to run Postfix in the next chapter or so. In more depth than the Postfix book.
it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago I simply wanted to re-write my host.domain.tld address on outgoing email to be simply host.tld. I bawked at the stupidities of learning a crappy sendmail language, then re-compiling it into yet another crappy language just to do this. A friend told me about postfix, and I've never looked back. I think only the massochistic, or those hopelessly lost in a legacy sendmail mess use sendmail these days.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
am i the only dork that decided to learn sendmail, and now have no issue with its configuration??
sheesh. i didnt think it was that hard -- ofcourse, i can see its complexity with a huge organization...but once its setup up, count on never having to touch it until an exploit is found (and these days, it seems rare for sendmail).
oh well....
back to that cf file.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you aren't. sendmail just works. Oh, and I
badly failed trying to configure postfix.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:1)
-G
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
OK I may just be jaded because sendmail has gotten me though some tough times and nasty issues at a time when uucp was still common.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:2)
You would wonder how many people on slashdot are just to young to remember the old slang terms
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:2)
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
I found the most attractive features of Postfix were having to do far less security patches, and the fact that my MTAs used far less resources, necessitating fewer upgrades.
YMMV.
Paul
M4 actually has some benefits (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying it is the best way, but there was a reason.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Funny)
I would never run qmail, and wouldn't recommend anyone use qmail.
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:3, Funny)
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Luckily, although qmail might have abandoned you with its error message, other F/OSS software authors have heard your plea:
To emphasize the highly professional nature of Nmap, all instances of "fucked up" in error message text has been changed to "b0rked".
( I'm half tempted to email in a patch to qmail that adds the configure flag of --idonthaveasenseofhumor )
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:2, Interesting)
honestpuck (Score:5, Funny)
I was glad when this book hit my desk at exactly the same time as I started upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to OS X Server
And I'm posting this anonymously because I know there are many of you who wondered the very same thing..
Re:honestpuck (Score:2, Funny)
Well, this book got an "8". Since on slashdot, the average review is a "9", this review could be considered critical.
Re:honestpuck (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in two minds about replying to this. I decided that since I let the last two similar comments slide it was about time to raise my voice again.
First. If you'd like a "critical" review (in fact most reviews raise at least one or two criticisms of a book, I think you mean "negative") then you only need to go back as far as my last review, "Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser" [slashdot.org]. If you want to read a review where I totally pan a book then try my review of Online! The Book [slashdot.org].
Second, I enjoy reading technical books and I enjoy writing. Slashdot just happens to be an open site for book reviews. From the number of book reviews that receive a large number of comments I'd say a lot of people enjoy reading them. From the number Timothy passes through the system I'd say he is fairly often short of reviews. Perhaps the negative, unknowing, unthinking comments of people such as yourself is one reason for that shortage. I've certainly noticed that the number of comments such as yours far outnumber the compliments that reviewers get.
Third. No one pays me to write these reviews. I do get to have my user id linking to my website. Last quarter that made a grand total of $21, which I took as an Amazon Gift Certificate to (patrially) feed my book habit. My guess is about 3/4 of that was due to getting my reviews published here.
Fourth. Yes, some of the books I review are sent to me by publishers. Some I buy, some are borrowed from friends. I just did a quick check and over the last few months I've refused to have sent to me by publishers about the same number I've said "yes" too. Both of the book reviews I mentioned above are actually of books sent to me by publishers so I believe I can truthfully say I am not influenced by how a book comes to me.
Finally, if you think my reviews are those of a "paid shill" you have two perfect solutions. Either write your own reviews or just don't read mine.
Tony Williams
*sigh* Humor impaired? (Score:4, Interesting)
And therefore, since the administration is so easy, you have plenty of time to read and review books.
See? He made a funny.
(Mind you, this is funny because it's true. If you'd said the same thing except about moving your servers from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2003 Advanced Server, he could have said the same thing, and it would've been funny because it was so outrageously false.)
-fred
Re:*sigh* Humor impaired? (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, the original comment about why I had the time to review all those books *was* funny.
The comment I was replying to was the one accusing me of being a "paid shill".
Tony
Postfix shortcomings (Score:4, Interesting)
Good book, but even with Kyle's help I still can't get procmail working with postfix. Postfix has its own filtering mechanism, including spam filtering. It doesn't seem to allow 3rd party apps like procmail and spamassassin to play with it, though. I can't find info on Gogole either. Is anyone using procmail or spamassassin with postfix?
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:2, Informative)
http://techie.org/Projects/TNMailServer-Full.as
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:5, Informative)
here you go:
http://www.geekly.com/entries/archives/00000155.h
Good luck.
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:2)
Last time I looked in one of his books, it was definitely written in Russian, not in Ukrainian.
Oblomov.
.
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:3, Informative)
mailbox_command =
main.cf:
smtp inet n - n - - smtpd -o content_filter=spamfilter
spamfilter unix - n n - - pipe flags=Rq user=spam argv=/usr/local/sbin/spamfilter.sh -f ${sender} -- ${recipient}
Both of which are documented in files linked to from http://www.postfix.org/docs.html
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:4, Informative)
http://lawmonkey.org/anti-spam.html
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:1)
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:5, Informative)
So not enabled by default, but easily remedied if you absolutely MUST have procmail. You can also enable it on a per-user basis by leaving those lines commented, and then using a
As for playing with spamassassin or other 3rd party programs, no problem. A quick check of the Documentation page [postfix.org] at www.postfix.org reveals all kinds of good info. The consensus on postfix-users is to use amavisd-new, and then call antivirus and/or spam filters from there.
Good luck!
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:3, Informative)
here's a link [khoosys.net]
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:1, Informative)
# add at beginning
smtp inet n - n - - smtpd
-o content_filter=filter:dummy
# add at end
filter unix - n n - - pipe
flags=R user=filter argv=/usr/local/bin/postfix-filter.sh -f ${sender} -- ${recipient}
#
# filter shell looks somthing like:
FILTER=yourfilter
cat > inp.$$ $FILTER < inp.$$ > msg.$$
exec $POSTFIX "$@" <
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:4, Interesting)
i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:2, Funny)
yeah.. that was about where I gave up on this review. Anyone that runs MacOS 9 as a server ... not someone I think I'd be taking advice from for my network.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Insightful)
our servers are mostly OS9 as well because the old computers migrate into servers and our office is mostly mac-based (blame the person who's name is on the company for making that decision 15 years ago)
I'd rather hear from someone who has a tough situation and how they figured a way out of it than from someone who has all the resources they want
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, who better to write a review of an introductory Postfix book than an admin just switching to Unix?
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd file that under "You all thought I was crazy, but who's laughing now?" I'm at the tail end of a migration of my own business from mostly Windows with one Mac and one Linux box, to a mix of OS X and Linux and a legacy Windows box... and lovin' it.
On the topic of Postfix, I switched from Sendmail (which I'd been tinkering with for a few years) to Postfix when I switched from RedHat to M
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, remember that even those you consider to be stupid often have good advice. This is one of those instances. Postfix is wonderful. Simple, secure, fast, powerful, extensible... Weitze did an amazing job writing it. He was the guy who wrote TCPWrappers
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry that's just my impression, but a matter of fact is that IT managers don't allow willy/nilly upgrades. In fact the chances are that in real life, you're managing something that was not designed by you. So you have to put up with whatever is there. And if it works... sort of
Same goes for coding; you take over project someone else has started and it might well be that you'll find yourself learning COBOL. You think that writing a CPU simulator in Java is stupid and inefficient; who cares we want it to run faster and you do whatever is needed to make that happen. That's life.
Ever seen an S390? Do you know how much IBM charges for fixing these? Do you have an idea how slow they are? But just taking the risk of upgrading to something new usually isn't worth it in real life.
Btw. he wasn't giving any advice on running a network, just a book review.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:2)
Anyhoo.. back to my reply: I was merely make a pun at the expensive of MacOS 9. IMHO OSX is the only decent MacOS ever. All the others were terrible; cooperative multit
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually not a bad platform at all and can be quite reliable.
Postfix? (Score:5, Funny)
/ | \
m / u
/ \
t s
/ \ / \
o d h i
An explanation (Score:5, Informative)
modthisup
For those of you too long out out CS class, just remember: left, right, root.
Re:Postfix? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Postfix? (Score:2)
I guess I need to...
Begun now (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Begun now (Score:2)
Re:Begun now (Score:2)
No flaming, just use Exim!
At least thats my opinion, and that of my ISP (Speakeasy [speakeasy.net])
Postfix doesn't require a book (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Postfix doesn't require a book (Score:4, Insightful)
The sooner sendmail is consigned... (Score:4, Funny)
Q. Why does the 'sendmail book' have a bat on the cover?
A. The diet of the North American brown bat is principally composed of bugs. Sendmail is a software package principally composed of bugs.
or;
A. Bat guano is a source of ammonium nitrate, a principal ingredient of things that blow up in your face, like sendmail.
(And many others, courtesy of 'the unix haters handbook' (worth a read)).
Obviously, the people who designed the sendmail configuration file system can't have been smoking crack, it wasn't invented back then.
So what was it that they were on? LSD?
Re:The sooner sendmail is consigned... (Score:2, Funny)
It's widely been a subject of suspicious conjecture that Sendmail was written at the University of Berkeley shortly after LSD was invented in the same university.
I have Postfix on a box at my work here, and am loving it...too bad Sendmail on the production systems, its sendmail.cf hacked by dozens of admins before me, will never go away. If you wonder why, try working for a federal government bureaucracy and making any change whatsoever to the status quo.
Re:The sooner sendmail is consigned... (Score:2)
About sendmail.cf (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no sendmail appologizer, but the only time anyone should be messing with
As for me, I've been using qmail since '97 and I recommend it to anyone with the patience to change the
Re:About sendmail.cf (Score:2, Interesting)
Since sendmail may have been started with inetd on a slow machine, sendmail.cf was designed to be very fast to parse. How fast? A decade ago the parser could do millions of lines a second on fast hardware for the day. Thats not a major deal now but it did help on a pdp11 or an early vax.
Sendmail is not static and its still evolving. It was the 1st open source program that worked around insecure OS bugs an
Re:About sendmail.cf (Score:2)
I'm not sure about that, exim has a dnsdb database type that it can apply lookups too so one ought to be able to get an SPF lookup in pure exim config.
the standard exim SPF config does use the perl daemon (that comes with SPF) for ease of coding though.
while I'm sure there are things that endmail can do which other mta's can't, how many of those things are required? while i can't speak for postfix or qmail
Re:About sendmail.cf (Score:2)
Perhaps the question should be how many of those things are required nowadays?
Back in 1989, being able to translate DecMail addresses to RFC822 was a very useful feature. Nowadays, it's so arcane I doubt if anyone who reads this has actually done it. But sendmail still can.
Next book to buy (Score:2, Interesting)
This book is great... (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: My buddy works at bookpool (but their prices really are great!)
I've been using this book to migrate our existing sendmail gobbilygook mailsystem to a sane well documented postfix system and I've found the book to be a great help as I've had to do a one to one comparision between sendmail and postfix for configuration stuff.
Plus Dent's writing style is excellent and the book is well laid out.
Here's a cut'n'paste of the entire book. (Score:4, Funny)
Postfix, it just works!
---[snip]---
Sendmail under Panther (Score:3, Insightful)
Sendmail was incompatible with xcode, probably because of the latest version of GCC. I just checked, and it seems to have been fixed in 8.12.11. At the time it was easier to find a 10.2 box than to dig up the compiler switch command and remember to switch it back afterwards.
Another Postfix book is coming soon (Score:5, Informative)
Ralf Hildebrandt & someone else (sorry, forgot who) are working on another very current Postfix book as well. Keep an eye on Amazon.com for it.
I've also read the O'Reilly Postfix book and found it to contain a lot of information. It's nice to have around.
Re:Another Postfix book is coming soon (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159327001 1/qid=1077836565/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/002-8092152-647 2869
It isn't out yet, however.
It's published by "No Starch Press," which must have some relationship with O'Reilly since it was in their latest catalog as well.
Re:Another Postfix book is coming soon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another Postfix book is coming soon (Score:2, Interesting)
postfix instead of sendmail - that's a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I replaced sendmail wwith postfix on all my non-isiolated machines last year after the sendmail vulnerability-of-the-week treadmill got very old.
it was *really* simple to do.
postfix: the ultimate sendmail patch.
On the evil of colons in book titles (Score:2, Interesting)
I found the article referenced by Arts & Letters Daily [aldaily.com].
Postfix for speed (Score:4, Informative)
Postfix, on the other hand, 'out of the box' was wonderful, (not to mention easy to use) and when I learned to tune things like filesystem parameters, optimal disk subsystem layout, and such it only got better. Our Postfix installation where I work continues to amaze me with how much mail it processes each day, with little or no maintenance, even under heavy load (1M+ incoming messages/day between 5 dual-CPU, 2-disk SCSI PIII-class machines). My gut feeling is that with some beefier boxes, and a pile of disks I could get that down to 2 machines handling the same amount of traffic.
Another plus for Postfix is its flexibility, and, if you need to get so deep, its hackability. The code is extremely clean, modular, and easy to work with.
PostFix + MYSQL + Cyrus Rocks!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Virtual users with mysql ROCK! Add a record in mysql,
and a couple folders on the server(via cron jobs that also check the MYSQL database) and voila!
I don't like to plug my business on slashdot, so I'll post anonymously, but this setup has worked wonde
Re:PostFix + MYSQL + Cyrus Rocks!!! (Score:2, Informative)
I had also known Sendmail was a little tedious to learn. My main job is software development, but we are a small company so I multi task as system admin for about 10 systems, mostly Linux with a couple of internal windows systems.
None of the email systems are REAL painful to get working, even Sendmail. I can learn and understand these types of things easily with the years of experience I have. The thing is in a small company I have to squeeze every minute I can out of a day because my time
postfix (Score:3, Informative)
Some would argue about the license (especially BSD people who also argue about GPL being not liberal enough) but it's OSI approved so most arguments are vapour.
On taking good patches - TLS (Score:2)
Just having gotten postfix/sasl/tls/auth going, I have to say, it's not sensible that postfix ships without the TLS functionality. It was easy once I found the patches, and maybe I missed something, but it took me a while to realize it wasn't bundled by default. Anybody know why this is?
It's just not a good idea to setup a mailserver today for most users without supporting
Anti-SPAM Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin (Score:3, Informative)
here [flakshack.com] is a fine guide to build a Fairly-Secure Anti-SPAM Gateway Using OpenBSD, Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Razor and DCC.
You can follow the steps and build it with Linux too. This entire procedure has been developed with security as a primary focus. These are the main tools it shows:
A request for Wietse... (Score:4, Interesting)
In this day and age of DNS and MTAs synergizing [slashdot.org] to combat spam, it kind of makes some sense, doesn't it?
I use tinydns myself but the DJB way has also irked me. Which is why I turned to postfix after evaluating qmail long ago. sendmail's security problems and horrid config made it out of the question.
Kinda like BIND. Though the config isn't as bad as sendmail.cf (and tinydns's data file is about as bad), I'd like to see what Wietse would come up with...
-h3
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Offtopic)
Apple has contributed very little to FreeBSD, all of the contributions have been to the userland; NONE to the kernel.
No, I'm not complaining, I'm very glad that Apple released a nice test suite that allowed us to find some rather nasty NFS bugs; but other than that, Apple has does no more than helping FreeBSD get the recognition it deserves, which is no little thing by the way.
The FreeBSD realation with Apple is technically one-sided, Apple benefits, FreeBSD
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Insightful)
The FreeBSD realation with Apple is technically one-sided, Apple benefits, FreeBSD doesn't.
Well, I thought that was what the BSD license's for. You write code, a company comes in, takes it, does whatever suits them without any need of giving back. If you want a reciprocal relationship, license the code under the GPL.
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Informative)
http://netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin [netbsd.org]
Re:Is it just me.. (Score:1)
mailbox_command =
Re:Is it just me.. (Score:2)
The headline is just one word, Postfix, so how could you tell?