Why Postfix is called Postfix and IBM secure mailer

How many greybeards here remember the O&#x27;reilly Sendmail bat book[1]? I built an ISP off of deciphering cryptic sendmail.cf parameters from it. This is what the &quot;fix&quot; in Postfix aims to &quot;fix&quot;.<p>(Although the Postfix config files are no walk in the park either.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;sendmail-4th-edition&#x2F;9780596510299&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;sendmail-4th-edition&#x2F;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&#x27;s ever used Sendmail knows which problem it was fixing :D There&#x27;s also qmail, but we don&#x27;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 &quot;IBM-SSH&quot;.<p>IBM-SSH consistent of some IBM guy replacing every instance of &quot;OpenSSH&quot; with &quot;IBM-SSH&quot;. 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;panda.ime.usp.br&#x2F;pythonds&#x2F;static&#x2F;pythonds_pt&#x2F;02-EDBasicos&#x2F;InfixPrefixandPostfixExpressions.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;panda.ime.usp.br&#x2F;pythonds&#x2F;static&#x2F;pythonds_pt&#x2F;02-EDBa...</a>

&gt; &quot;post&quot; was a different word for &quot;mail&quot;,<p>this is clear<p>&gt; and &quot;fix&quot; was for Sendmail<p>this is unclear. I don&#x27;t know how you get &quot;fix&quot; from &quot;Sendmail&quot;

I thought it was a play on &quot;pustefix&quot; which is the name of a German bear that is on these bubbles:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=german+bubbles+bear&amp;rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS901US901&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjg8d28oOn2AhU1CjQIHbQUCh8Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw&amp;biw=1656&amp;bih=787&amp;dpr=1.16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=german+bubbles+bear&amp;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;techmonitor.ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;att_unveils_43_mips_3b4000_80386_boxes_from_olivetti" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techmonitor.ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;att_unveils_43_mips_3b4000...</a>

Interesting contrast where the &quot;post&quot; in Postgres is there for the other meaning of post.

It wasn&#x27;t originally called Postfix; it was VMailer.

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&#x27;s interesting to see that the most popular who came out as &quot;winner&quot; 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&#x2F;cyrus service

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