Invited Talk: Postfix Lessons Learned (by Wietse Venema)

Wietse presents a retrospective of the open source Postfix MTA, including its impact on IBM and on the rest of the world. The primary goals, security, performance and ease of configuration, were easily met in less than one year. It took eight more years before Postfix could be declared "mostly complete". Postfix is primarily a skeleton mail system: it has built-in support for the basic stable protocols (SMTP, TLS, SASL, DSN, MIME) and light-weight anti-spam/virus, and comes with a combination of standard and private extension interfaces. Third-party extensions provide the support for SPF, SenderID, DKIM, greylisting and heavy-weight anti-spam/virus.

About the Speaker:

Wietse Venema is known for his software such as the TCP Wrapper and the POSTFIX mail system. He co-authored the SATAN network scanner and the Coroner's Toolkit (TCT) for forensic analysis, as well as a book on Forensic Discovery. Wietse received awards from the System Administrator's Guild (SAGE), the Netherlands UNIX User Group (NLUUG), as well as a Sendmail innovation award. He served a two-year term as chair of the international Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST). Wietse currently is a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson research center. After completing his Ph.D. in physics he changed career to computer science and never looked back.