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Postfix's Wietse Venema Interviewed 12

Posted by timothy 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."
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Postfix's Wietse Venema Interviewed More

Postfix's Wietse Venema Interviewed

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  • 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!

  • brother (Score:3, Funny)

    by terrymaster69 ( 792830 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @11:11PM (#10906632)
    Does he have a brother named Goatse? /kidding...
  • 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.

  • Most evolved MTA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by r7 ( 409657 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @11:41PM (#10906784)
    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
    • 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 al

  • Postfix rocks (Score:3, Informative)

    by ajayrockrock ( 110281 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2004 @02:01AM (#10907326) Homepage
    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
  • 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.

  • From a software developers point of view... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by andawyr ( 212118 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2004 @08:45AM (#10908373)
    ...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....

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