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| Developer(s) | Wietse Venema and many others |
| Stable release | 2.6.5 / 2009-08-28 |
| Preview release | 2.7-20091023 / 2009-10-23 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Mail transfer agent |
| License | IBM Public License |
| Website | http://www.postfix.org/ |
Postfix is a free and open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA.
Postfix is the default MTA for a number of Unix(-like) operating systems such as GNU/Linux.
It is released under the IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software licence.
Formerly known as VMailer and IBM Secure Mailer, it was originally written by Wietse Venema during a stay at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and continues to be actively developed today. Postfix was first released in mid-1999.
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Features
- Transport Layer Security;
- Delegation of SMTP policies to an external process (this allows Greylisting) and advanced content filtering;
- Different databases for maps: Berkeley DB, CDB, DBM, LDAP, MySQL and PostgreSQL;
- Mbox-style mailboxes, Maildir-style mailboxes, and virtual domains;
- Address rewriting (envelope and header), VERP, SMTP-AUTH via SASL, and more;
- Milter [1] support compatible with Sendmail milters;
- Using policyd-weight, can check e-mail headers against various DNSBLs and for RFC compliance, and reject near-certain spam ahead of receiving the body of the messages, lessening server load;
- Can be compiled on AIX, BSD, HP-UX, IRIX, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX and, generally speaking, on every Unix-like OS that ships with a C compiler and delivers a standard POSIX development environment.
One of the strengths of Postfix is its resilience against buffer overflows.[citation needed] Another one is its handling of large amounts of e-mail.[1] Postfix is built as a cooperating network of different daemons.[2] Each daemon fulfills a single task using minimum privileges.[2] In this way, if a daemon is compromised, the impact remains limited to that daemon and cannot spread throughout the entire system. There is only one process with root privileges (master), and a few (local, virtual, pipe)[citation needed] that actually write to disk or invoke external programs.[2]Most daemons can be easily chrooted and communicate through named pipes.
Structure
See Postfix Architecture Overview
Base configuration
The main.cf file stores site specific Postfix configuration parameters while master.cf defines daemon processes. The Postfix Basic Configuration tutorial covers the core settings that each site needs to consider.
Configuration settings for a few common environments are discussed in Postfix Standard Configuration Examples.
Address rewriting and mail routing are covered in Postfix Address Rewriting. The full documentation collection is at Postfix Documentation
More complex Postfix implementations include integration with e.g. SpamAssassin and support for multiple (virtual) domain names, where complex configurations can be data-driven from databases such as MySQL.[3]
See also
Further reading
- Kyle D. Dent (2003). Postfix: The Definitive Guide. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-00212-2.
- Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter (2005). The book of Postfix : state-of-the-art message transport. No Starch Press. ISBN 1-59327-001-1.
References
External links
- Official website
- http://www.postfixwiki.org/
- Postfix "how to" with configuration examples and explanation
- http://serverkit.org/modules/postfix-policy A high performance Postfix policy delegation server
- http://www.360is.com/06-postfix.htm Postfix introduction and analysis for secure environments
- #postfix on freenode
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