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".<p>(Although the Postfix config files are no walk in the park either.)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sendmail-4th-edition/9780596510299/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sendmail-4th-edition/97...</a>
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.
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".<p>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.
I always thought of “postfix” as in prefix, infix, and postfix operators[1].<p>Curious if this was an intentional pun.<p>1. <a href="https://panda.ime.usp.br/pythonds/static/pythonds_pt/02-EDBasicos/InfixPrefixandPostfixExpressions.html" rel="nofollow">https://panda.ime.usp.br/pythonds/static/pythonds_pt/02-EDBa...</a>
> "post" was a different word for "mail",<p>this is clear<p>> and "fix" was for Sendmail<p>this is unclear. I don't know how you get "fix" from "Sendmail"
I thought it was a play on "pustefix" which is the name of a German bear that is on these bubbles:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=german+bubbles+bear&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS901US901&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjg8d28oOn2AhU1CjQIHbQUCh8Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1656&bih=787&dpr=1.16" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=german+bubbles+bear&rlz=1C1C...</a>
Off topic: techmonitor.ai seems to good source for ancient tech news (like Google books but plaintext). Fun to digging. Pick random news: <a href="https://techmonitor.ai/technology/att_unveils_43_mips_3b4000_80386_boxes_from_olivetti" rel="nofollow">https://techmonitor.ai/technology/att_unveils_43_mips_3b4000...</a>
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.<p>It's interesting to see that the most popular who came out as "winner" has been postfix,<p>altho these days most people would setup a relay with msmtp going to a closed source provider than full fledged postfix/cyrus service