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From: Victor Duchovni on 27 Apr 2010 12:24
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:19:23AM -0400, N. Yaakov Ziskind wrote:

> Victor Duchovni wrote (on Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 01:28:24AM -0400):
> > Also, at this point, with Postfix driving such a large share of the
> > Internet email infrastructure,
>
> Can you, please, elucidate on this? Some numbers, perhaps, or a list of
> Fortune XX companies that use it? It would be useful in selling the
> suits.

I think just AOL alone is sufficient to make the point. Surveys are very
difficult to conduct in this space. Here's an informal sample: in 880924
messages received from remote systems yesterday, the following (identifiable)
MTA frequencies were observed in the top-most remote Received header:

$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c .
880924
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c Postfix
134368
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c '\(8\.|8\.\S+/8\.|Sendmail|Switch-'
104785
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c Microsoft
97258
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c qmail
47158
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c ecelerity
43245
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c pcregrep -c PowerMTA
42781
$ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c Exim
17318

The total number of identified MTAs was ~487,000, so unless you can
guess at another MTA that accounts for a larger share in the remaining
less than half of the sample, Posffix is at number 1. Note that some
systems hide the fact that they are Postfix and are not counted, for
example "Zixconect" a provider of border email encryption for businesses
emits, headers with:

Received: from ZIX05.STRONGPORT.COM (ZixVPM [127.0.0.1]) by Outbound.strongport.com (Proprietary) with ESMTP id 67081E89CE

which are clearly Postfix, but were not counted. This was just 1500 of
the messages, but all it takes a vendor using a different "mail_name"
in a repackaged Postfix, and I need a much more complex pattern matcher
than I was willing to assemble on the spot.

--
Viktor.

P.S. Morgan Stanley is looking for a New York City based, Senior Unix
system/email administrator to architect and sustain our perimeter email
environment. If you are interested, please drop me a note.

From: Wietse Venema on 27 Apr 2010 12:55
N. Yaakov Ziskind:
> Victor Duchovni wrote (on Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 01:28:24AM -0400):
> > Also, at this point, with Postfix driving such a large share of the
> > Internet email infrastructure,
>
> Can you, please, elucidate on this? Some numbers, perhaps, or a list of
> Fortune XX companies that use it? It would be useful in selling the
> suits.

For survey of 400,000 company domain gateways, see:
http://www.postfix.org/postfix-mailchannels.pdf

Wietse

From: Simon Waters on 27 Apr 2010 13:24
On Tuesday 27 April 2010 17:24:35 Victor Duchovni wrote:
>
> $ < /tmp/data pcregrep -c Postfix
> 134368

If we are hijacking the thread for how to convince suits to use Postfix...

Picking an MTA based only on popularity would have got you sendmail until
fairly recently, and I don't think anyone would want that.

All the figures show is that lots of people use Postfix.

That big companies like AOL and HP use Postfix tells you it is probably
suitable for big companies. One wonders why IBM greets like sendmail
sometimes though ;)

That small mail admins like myself use it tells you it probably isn't too
onerous to setup.

The hard thing when comparing mail solutions is I believe comparing systems
that try to do everything (some include Postfix), versus building from
constituent parts. Historically the "do everythings" have been onerously
complicated, and/or insecure. But I really can't comment on things like SUN
Java Messaging Server, Groupwise, or even current versions of Lotus Notes,
other than to say in my experience such combined products have been
relatively inflexible (hence a lot of the discussion about putting Postfix in
front of Exchange for security and filtering).

Of course what is really needed to convince suits is someone to take them to
play golf, and explain why paying a lot of money will be good for their
company.

From: Eero Volotinen on 27 Apr 2010 18:31
> The hard thing when comparing mail solutions is I believe comparing systems
> that try to do everything (some include Postfix), versus building from
> constituent parts. Historically the "do everythings" have been onerously
> complicated, and/or insecure. But I really can't comment on things like SUN
> Java Messaging Server, Groupwise, or even current versions of Lotus Notes,
> other than to say in my experience such combined products have been
> relatively inflexible (hence a lot of the discussion about putting Postfix in
> front of Exchange for security and filtering).
>
> Of course what is really needed to convince suits is someone to take them to
> play golf, and explain why paying a lot of money will be good for their
> company.
>

Well, opensource products still lacks of working "shared groupcalendar
and meeting support"

I hope that soon there is at least one working caldav server with
client support? (thunderbird+lightning+some working caldav server?)


--
Eero

From: Mij on 4 May 2010 07:48
On Apr 22, 2010, at 4:21 , Wietse Venema wrote:

>> Hello folks,
>>
>> Postfix appears to be breaking RFC 5321 by speculatively injecting
>> the entire envelope session passing over replies from the server.
>
> Oh, and while you're collecting the evidence, you may also want to
> read up on RFC 2920 (SMTP Pipelining).

FTA, this is indeed result of RFC2920. The receiving daemon offers it
and this extension is "silently active".


Venema: don't take bug reports personally, better get a false alarm than
a missed bug.

Duchovni: the "critical mass" argument isn't so sound, we know the
consequences of Microsoft applying it for a decade with IE.

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