Wietse Venema

I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so…

— Wietse Venema

Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software…

— Wietse Venema

Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements.

— Wietse Venema

The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.

— Wietse Venema

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

— Wietse Venema

One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.

— Wietse Venema

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is…

— Wietse Venema

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

— Wietse Venema

At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for…

— Wietse Venema

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

— Wietse Venema

Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance.

— Wietse Venema

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

— Wietse Venema

Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service.

— Wietse Venema

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing…

— Wietse Venema

Windows favors multi-threading, which means that a service is implemented by one single process.

— Wietse Venema

I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even…

— Wietse Venema

Sure, but competition is good for the user.

— Wietse Venema

As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.

— Wietse Venema

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of…

— Wietse Venema

My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

— Wietse Venema

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

— Wietse Venema

I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they…

— Wietse Venema

Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it…

— Wietse Venema

Defect-free software does not exist.

— Wietse Venema

For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.

— Wietse Venema