29 Jul 2008
Richard
last updated:
16 Jun 2009
by Richard

upgrading Postfix is one of the easiest in it’s kind, thanks to the excellent Makefile creation done by Wietse Venema (the author of Postfix). The update will even add the latest options to your current config with the default values.

Here are the steps to follow when you are upgrading Postfix. This is only useful if you followed my original installation instructions for Postfix.

To upgrade your current Postfix installation you download the latest version of Postfix and follow the normal installation instructions including the ‘sudo make install‘. Make sure you use the same ‘make’ statement as you used earlier otherwise you might change locations of items. If you don’t remember it, here are the shortcuts to the different install versions:

The new version will activate when you stop and start Postifx. You can use the following commands to properly restart it:

sudo postfix stop
sudo postfix start

To test if everything works correctly check the logfile in ‘/var/log/mail.log‘ if postfix has been started and try to send a mail to and from an external mail service like gmail.

If something has gone wrong and you want to revert to your previous version you can go to the source directory of the previous Postfix release you had installed and execute a ‘sudo make install‘ from there and restart Postfix again. All should be well again.