Postfix is a free and open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that routes and delivers electronic mail. It is released under the IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software license. Alternatively, starting with version 3.2.5, it is available under the Eclipse Public License 2.0 at the user's option. Originally written in 1997 by Wietse Venema at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, and first released in December 1998, Postfix continues to be actively developed by its creator and other contributors. The software is also known by its former names VMailer and IBM Secure Mailer. The name Postfix is a compound of "post" (which is another word for "mail") and "fix" (which is for other software that inspired Postfix development). In a study published on June 1, 2022 by E-Soft, Inc., approximately 34% of the publicly reachable mail-servers on the Internet ran Postfix, making it the second most popular mail server behind Exim. Note: this survey covers less than 25% of the 4+ million reachable SMTP servers on the Internet. Typical deployment As an SMTP server, Postfix implements a first layer of defense against spambots and malware. Administrators can combine Postfix with other software that provides spam/virus filtering (e.g., Amavisd-new), message-store access (e.g., Dovecot), or complex SMTP-level access-policies (e.g., postfwd, milter-regex, policyd-weight). As an SMTP client, Postfix implements a high-performance parallelized mail-delivery engine. Postfix is often combined with mailing-list software (such as Mailman). Operating systems Postfix runs (or has run) on AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, Solaris and, generally speaking, on every Unix-like operating system that ships with a C compiler and delivers a standard POSIX development environment. It is the default MTA for the macOS, NetBSD, RedHat/CentOS and Ubuntu operating systems. Architecture Postfix consists of a combination of server programs that run in the background, and client programs that are invoked by user programs or by system administrators. The Postfix core consists of several dozen server programs that run in the background, each handling one specific aspect of email delivery. Examples are the SMTP server, the scheduler, the address rewriter, and the local delivery server. For damage-control purposes, most server programs run with fixed reduced privileges, and terminate voluntarily after processing a limited number of requests. To conserve system resources, most server programs terminate when they become idle. Client programs run outside the Postfix core. They interact with Postfix server programs through mail delivery instructions