Additional Information and How to Obtain Postfix

You can get more information about Postfix at the official web site: The Postfix Home Page (http://www.postfix.org/). The site contains the source code, documentation, links to add-on software, articles, and additional information about Postfix. There is also information about joining an active mailing list that discusses all aspects of Postfix.

If you don’t have a copy of Postfix already, you can obtain the source code from the Postfix web site. It is, however, quite possible that there is a precompiled package for your platform that may be more convenient for you. If that is the case, you can obtain the Postfix package for your operating system and use your system’s normal tools for software installation and configuration. You should check the normal repositories you use to get software for your system.

There are many good reasons to build Postfix for yourself: there may not be a pre-packaged bundle for your platform, you might not trust the packager of the bundle to have done everything correctly for your environment, you might need support for add-ons that are not built into a package, you might need a more current version than is available in packages, or you might just enjoy the task. If you have any experience compiling software, you’ll have no trouble building Postfix. It’s one of the easier open source packages to compile.

The Postfix web site has a download link that displays a list of mirrors from which you can get the software. You should select the mirror that is closest to you. Postfix is available as either an Official Release package or as an Experimental Release package. Even though it’s called experimental, you should consider the code to be very stable. Experimental releases contain new features that might still change before they become official. Some new features are available only in an experimental release, but you should feel comfortable using them. Just be aware that they may evolve slightly in later releases until their feature sets are considered stable enough for the official release. No Postfix software is released that hasn’t gone through extensive testing and review. Read through the RELEASE_NOTES file that comes with the package to learn what the differences are between the current official and experimental releases.

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