from Hacker News

Why Postfix is called Postfix and IBM secure mailer

by gurrone on 3/28/22, 3:13 PM with 24 comments

  • by _nickwhite on 3/28/22, 4:23 PM

    How many greybeards here remember the O'reilly Sendmail bat book[1]? I built an ISP off of deciphering cryptic sendmail.cf parameters from it. This is what the "fix" in Postfix aims to "fix".

    (Although the Postfix config files are no walk in the park either.)

    [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sendmail-4th-edition/97...

  • by geocrasher on 3/28/22, 3:40 PM

    A neat bit of history. Just the name Postfix has always conjured up in mind that it was fixing a problem. And anybody who's ever used Sendmail knows which problem it was fixing :D There's also qmail, but we don't discuss that in good company.

  • by Spooky23 on 3/28/22, 3:33 PM

    This was a thing at IBM at that time. I remember eyerolling at a new employer where we per paying a few thousand dollars per server from "IBM-SSH".

    IBM-SSH consistent of some IBM guy replacing every instance of "OpenSSH" with "IBM-SSH". One of the interns noticed with one release the find replace hit the man pages.

  • by jchook on 3/28/22, 10:39 PM

    I always thought of “postfix” as in prefix, infix, and postfix operators[1].

    Curious if this was an intentional pun.

    1. https://panda.ime.usp.br/pythonds/static/pythonds_pt/02-EDBa...

  • by smcl on 3/28/22, 5:49 PM

    > "post" was a different word for "mail",

    this is clear

    > and "fix" was for Sendmail

    this is unclear. I don't know how you get "fix" from "Sendmail"

  • by locusofself on 3/28/22, 4:47 PM

    I thought it was a play on "pustefix" which is the name of a German bear that is on these bubbles:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=german+bubbles+bear&rlz=1C1C...

  • by fomine3 on 3/29/22, 2:39 AM

    Off topic: techmonitor.ai seems to good source for ancient tech news (like Google books but plaintext). Fun to digging. Pick random news: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/att_unveils_43_mips_3b4000...

  • by tyingq on 3/28/22, 4:49 PM

    Interesting contrast where the "post" in Postgres is there for the other meaning of post.

  • by tptacek on 3/28/22, 6:29 PM

    It wasn't originally called Postfix; it was VMailer.

  • by ossusermivami on 3/28/22, 8:06 PM

    ah the good old days, when a bunch of MTA was coming out (exim, vmail, qmail and postfix) to replace sendmail cf and m4 atrocities.

    It's interesting to see that the most popular who came out as "winner" has been postfix,

    altho these days most people would setup a relay with msmtp going to a closed source provider than full fledged postfix/cyrus service

  • by locusofself on 3/28/22, 4:48 PM

    Postfix is good software, but I do not miss managing email servers.