On Feb 12, 2017 21:07, "Wietse Venema" <wie...@porcupine.org> wrote: > 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.
Let me add my thanks to the accolades expressed by others on this list to you, Mr. Venema, and the other regular contributors. I've already talked about how I found the versatility of PostFix fixed problems at a Web hosting company; let me add my personal experiences to the story: I was the first paying customer for DSL in Reno NV, and was awarded the booby prize of having to use the mail servers that Pacific Telesys provided for its customers. I found myself locked out of sending mail to many destinations because of SORBS and other DNSBLs reacting to the spew coming from "those" servers. The final straw was when I found myself locked out of contributing to the Linux Kernel list. That was in 2000, or 16 years ago. I had my own domain, satchell.net, using Register.com's DNS servers, so I decided to operate my own mail server to avoid some of the blocks I encountered with the ISP mail servers. I looked at Sendmail and Qmail, and got depressed. Then I discovered PostFix, and successfully set up my own mail server on Red Hat 6 -- first on a DHCP-allocated address, then a static IP when Nevada Bell opened DSL provisioning to third parties. My initial experience was very positive. It was later when I started loading up my library shelves with books on PostFix, to take advantage of many more of the features that the program offers. I've gone through four iterations of personal mail server boxes, and will be building a fifth sometime in Q2 of this year, when CentOS 7 is rumoured to incorporate a reasonable up-to-date version of Postfix. (Or, I'll compile from source if I have to -- the new mail server will be dedicated to mail only, with Dovecot for IMAP.) Let me say that the experience of running a personal PostFix server was part of the reason I got the job at the Web hosting company...and the rest of that experience you already know. Again, thank you.
