Postfix got updated quite quickly after the 2.9.0 release with 2 small bug fixes.

• The “change header” Milter request could replace the wrong header. A long header name could match a shorter one, because a length check was done on the wrong string. Reported by Vladimir Vassiliev. This was introduced with Postfix 2.3.
• “sendmail -bs” segfault, due to a missing guard statement after an smtpd_check_rewrite() call was moved closer to the command processor loop. Fix by Bartek Szady. This was introduced 20111219 near the end of the 2.9 development cycle.

From the earlier stable release 2.9.0, the main changes in no particular order are:

• Support for long, non-repeating, queue IDs (queue file names). The main benefit of non-repeating names is simpler logfile analysis. See the description of “enable_long_queue_ids” in postconf(5) for details.
• Memcache client support, and support to share postscreen(8) and verify(8) caches via the proxymap server. Details about memcache support are in memcache_table(5) and MEMCACHE_README.
• Gradual degradation: if a database is unavailable (can’t open, most read or write errors) a Postfix daemon will log a warning and continue providing the services that don’t depend on that table, instead of immediately terminating with a fatal error. To terminate immediately when a database file can’t be opened, specify “daemon_table_open_error_is_fatal = yes”.
• Revised postconf(1) command. It warns about unused parameter name=value settings in main.cf or master.cf (likely mistakes), understands “dynamic” parameter names such as names that depend on the name of a master.cf entry (finally, “postconf -n” shows all parameter settings), and it can display main.cf and master.cf in a more user-friendly format (postconf -nf, postconf -Mf).
• Read/write deadline support in the SMTP client and server to defend against application-level DOS attacks that very slowly write or read data one byte at a time.

I’ve tested it and running it on my servers without any problems.

I feel the need to ask for patience as this week we got bombarders by a lot of updates. Dovecot did a major upgrade to 2.1, Apache released a major upgrade to 2.4, postfix released 2.9.1 a small bugfix and MySQL released 5.5.21.

I need to compile, test and adjust everything where necessary and as you might understand with major upgrade there is more going on then just a compile, run and test. There are new configuration options to be evaluated and older ones deprecated that might need a new one or a workaround for lost functionality.

So I’m working on it but it take a bit longer then usual…

Here is a new version of Postfix, just released and I’ve got it tested on Snow Leopard and Lion on my test and production machines. This release contains a workaround for a problem that is fixed in Postfix 2.9.

• The postscreen daemon, which is not enabled by default, sent non-compliant SMTP responses (220- followed by 421) when it could not give a connection to a real smtpd process. These responses caused some remote SMTP clients to return mail as undeliverable.

  The workaround is to hang up after sending 220- without sending the 421 “sorry” reply; this is harmless.

  The complete fix involves too much change for a stable release: send the 220 greeting, wait for the EHLO command, then send the 421 “sorry” reply and hang up.

Howto upgrade postfix.

Here is a new version of Postfix, just released and I’ve got it tested on Snow Leopard and Lion on my test and production machines.

• The Postfix SMTP daemon sent “bare” newline characters instead of when a header_checks REJECT pattern matched multi-line header. This bug was introduced with Postfix 1.1.
• The Postfix SMTP daemon sent “bare” newline characters instead of when an smtpd_proxy_filter returned a multi-line response. This bug was introduced with Postfix 2.1.
• For compatibility with future EAI (email address internationalization) implementations, the Postfix MIME processor no longer enforces the strict_mime_encoding_domain check on unknown message subtypes such as message/global*. This check is disabled by default.
• The Postfix master daemon could report a panic error (“master_spawn: at process limit”) after the process limit for some service was reduced with “postfix reload”. This bug existed in all Postfix versions.

Howto upgrade postfix.

Here is a new version of Postfix, just released and I’ve got it tested on Snow Leopard and Leopard on my test machines. It solves some small bugs for the Postfix Milter client that were already included with the Postfix 2.9 experimental release as listed below:

• The Postfix Milter client logged a “milter miltername: malformed reply” error when a Milter sent an SMTP response without enhanced status code (i.e. “XXX Text” instead of “XXX X.X.X Text”).
• The Postfix Milter client sent a random {client_connections} macro value when the remote SMTP client was not subject to any smtpd_client_* limit. As a workaround, it now sends a zero value instead.

Howto upgrade postfix.