Am 12.02.2017 um 19:06 schrieb Wietse Venema: > Last month it was 20 years ago that I started writing Postfix code. > After coming to IBM research in November 1996, I spent most of > December and January making notes on paper. I knew that writing a > mail system was more work than any of my prior projects. > > The oldest tarball, dated 19970220, contains library functions plus > two early versions of the master daemon. There are 8086 lines of > code, 4204 lines after stripping the comments, and the only > documentation was my pile of hand-written notes.
Dear Wietse 'Dr. Postfix' Venema, I am pleased to see that you are still in charge of the MTA that has already come of age. When I began switching my - mostly qmail - setups to Postfix in the late 1990's, setting it loose into production long before 1.0 was on the horizon, with good success, it required far less of my attention than any other MTA afoot at the time. While sendmail was going through rough times, being overrun by the bad guys on Internet, to recover quite a bit later, and qmail was slowing down magnetic spinning disks with ridiculous amounts of synchronous writes and bouncing spam with counterfeit senders it had previously accepted responsibility for, and many other MTAs and MDAs of that time have fallen into disrepair, neglect, oblivion, or some other abyss, Postfix has prevailed, along with a few other grown-up MTAs that I care less about. At the time, around 1999, I haven't thought much about the longevity of Postfix, which was the best mailer for my needs at the time, and whether it would be for two or five years was long enough, be that home or production use, and I had always feared you'd move on to other projects. I see - with delight - that you are still around and busy with Postfix, and I feel that your hand has guided Postfix well through many many years, and if there is one project where a sound design of compatibility shows and shines brightly, and makes it a really pleasurable experience as user or admin to not be surprised in nasty ways, then it is Postfix. Thank you - and IBM, and the other major contributors - so much for the continued contribution of an important piece of backbone software that "just works". It's been a ride I've always enjoyed and continue to enjoy, and I hope that when the day comes that you move on to other projects, that there will be a maintainer with a similar sense of continuity. I would never have bet on even a decade, and even though I haven't put anything at stake other than my time, well done, keep going. Thanks again! Cheers, Matthias
