RubyForge switching to Postfix

01 Jun 2006

Yup, RubyForge is no longer running Sendmail... I've seen the light and moved it to Postfix. I like Postfix because the configuration files are readable (no more m4!), it's being actively developed, and the spam checks are easy to maintain. Right now I don't have Amavis or ClamAV or any of that stuff running, just a bunch of SMTP/header/body checks and sender verification. Maybe at some point I'll set up a "real" spam checker, but for now, this seems to be OK.

I've got a couple of Postfix books; the most useful one so far has been The Book of Postfix by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter. I tend to buy books for almost every open source project I use; got to support those open source coders!

Postfix seems to be handling the RubyForge email load just fine; check out the activity graph for the past 24 hours:

It's kind of interesting to see the outgoing vs incoming email ratio; it's almost five to one. I guess that stands to reason since a lot of the RubyForge email is for mailing lists, notifications when a new bug/release/whatever is created, and all that sort of thing.

GForge (which is what RubyForge is built on) seems to work just fine with Postfix's /usr/bin/sendmail client stub programs, which is nice. And Mailman is easy to use with Postfix; it just drops the list aliases in a file and an alias_maps entry in main.cf picks them up. Good times!