Postfix 3.8.0 has been released after 14 months of development, along with the announcement of the termination of support for the Postfix 3.4 branch, which was released in early 2019. Postfix is known for its rare combination of high safety, reliability, and performance, achieved thanks to its thoughtful architecture and strict policies and code design. The project code is distributed under the EPL 2.0 and IPL 1.0 licenses.
According to an automated survey that covered around 400,000 postal servers in January, Postfix is being used on 33.18% of the servers, a slight decrease from 34.08% a year ago. Meanwhile, EXIM covers 60.27%, SENDMLAM – 3.62%, Mailenable – 1.86%, MDAEMON- 0.39%, Microsoft Exchange – 0.19%, and OpenSMTPD – 0.06%.
Postfix’s latest release brings various innovations, including the client SMTP/LMTP’s ability to check DNS-records SRV to define the host and port of the postal server to transmit messages. Postfix also excluded Seed, IDEA, 3DEA, RC2, RC4, and RC5 HASH MD5 and ECDH metabolms from its list of algorithms. Additionally, a new setting has been added to include the FFDHE group in TLS 1.3.
To mitigate attacks aimed at memory exhaustion, Postfix now aggregates the statistics “smtpd_client_*_rate” and “smtpd_client_*_count” based on the network blocks’ size defined by “smtpd_client_ipv4_prefix_length” and “smtpd_client_ipv6_prefix_length” (default /32 and /84). Moreover, Postfix added protection against attacks that use TLS connection requests.
The PostConf team also improved warnings for comments set directly by the parameters in the Postfix configuration file. The latest version of Postfix is available for download, and users are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.