Unigroup's January '99 Meeting Announcement


Topic:
The PostFix Mail Server

Speaker:
Wietse Venema,
IBM

Date:
Thursday, January 21, 1999

Location:
The Chase Manhattan Bank (formerly Chemical Bank)
55 Water Street, South Tower
13th Floor Conference Room C

Time:
6:00 - 6:30 PM Registration
6:20 - 6:35 PM Ask the Wizard - Questions, Answers and Current Events
6:35 - 6:45 PM Unigroup Business
6:45 - 9:30 PM Main Presentation


Introduction:

Wietse Venema is known throughout the world as the author of popular, freely available Security Tools such as Satan (co-author), TCP Wrappers, Portmap and LogDaemon.

Postfix was written by Wietse Venema in an attempt to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset existing users.

Postfix is said to be up to three times as fast as its nearest competitor (qmail?), which means a desktop PC running Postfix should be able to receive and deliver a million different messages per day. Postfix uses web server tricks to reduce process creation overhead and uses other tricks to reduce file system overhead, without compromising reliability.


Description of Talk:

PostFix - What it is and what it does.


Speaker Biography:

(Autobiographical, Extracted from Mr. Venema's Web Page)

Previous life:

In a previous life I studied physics at Groningen University in the Netherlands, where I also did my Ph.D. dissertation.

Then I spent 12 years at Eindhoven University, also in the Netherlands, as systems architect at the Mathematics and Computing Science department.

For 10 years, part of that university time was devoted to writing tools for automated translation of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) messages. First with Nedlloyd, then with Encompass (now Calixon). This is the best software that I have written so far.

Current life:

Most people know me from software that I wrote to protect systems against Internet intruders. This began in 1990 when Eindhoven University was connected to the Internet.

I have given away the programs that I use myself, so that other people can inspect them, and can use the programs that they trust. By now, this software has an installed base of millions of systems.

I am continuing this tradition with IBM, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in the USA. The first result is Postfix. This is mail server software that is fast, easy to configure, and hopefully secure. I wrote it for those who seek an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail software that delivers billions of email messages daily.


VIEW A PICTURE FROM THE PRESENTATION


Complimentary Refreshments will be served.

Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!

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