Chad's Blog

I gave up on postfix on OS X a while ago. Maybe I'll give it a try again, just when I became accustomed to using smtp for development and sendmail for production.

Readers may also be interested in this posting titled "10.4 Enable postfix without inducing insomnia" -- intended for Tiger, not Leopard -- but maybe it will be of use: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050504131428334

Personally, I don't need the postfix daemon to listen on port 25. I'm having enough trouble just sending email via sendmail. I'm getting this error: "postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup: No such file or directory". Any suggestions?

I'm not great at Postfix; any tips on how to do some basic testing would be great -- i.e. simple command line tests to see if things are working right.

@David,

heh i'm no expert either. As for sendmail, why do you need it? Can't you use postfix instead?

As for confirming postfix is working, the telnet-to-port-25 approach I mentioned in the post should work. If it is up and accepting connections, then it should "just work" to send mail.

-- Chad

For others who get stuck at that point, what worked for me to add at the bottom of the dict element is:

RunAtLoad OnDemand

Looks like your xml got tidied up so it no longer worked.

Thanks for the explanation, now it works for me.

Oops, no, that's not what I put in. The comment editor mangled that too. I'm trying one more time, and if it still doesn't work, just know that it needs to be fixed. The second key is not a sub-element of the first key.

<key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> <key>OnDemand</key> <false/>

I still unable to get this working.

My telnet localhost 25 returns, so only checking the 127 address: Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. 220 firefly.local ESMTP Postfix

I've reloaded, restarted postfix then tested using:

mail myaddress@domain.com subject : test body . EOT

No email.

I even pasted in the main.cf content from a colleague who is able to send email from the command line and it still fails.

Any ideas?

Small correction, the port list command you used provides the available ports not the installed ones. You are correct, you don't have the postfix port installed =)

Link: http://guide.macports.org/

Relevant sections: The installed option displays all installed ports.

The list option is used to get a list of all available ports. The list of available ports is very long, so use search if you know a port's name or part of it.

@adam,

Hmm. Kind of suspicious that localhost doesn't resolve for you. Do you mean you can't ping localhost? I'd fix that first (put it in your hosts file), maybe it is related to your problem (some relevant config file is referring to localhost)...

@chad

Thanks for the quick reply. I was/am able to ping localhost and the telnet localhost 25 command returned sucess as you suggested, though it did not show the 2 initial Connection refused errors your listed.

<code>
telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 firefly.local ESMTP Postfix


ping localhost
PING localhost (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.086 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.066 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.083 ms
</code>

I noticing that the mail was failing with a timeout when inspecting "mailq". I then added authentication as per Matt Sears post and it's all working now.

I've posted a few commands and links here

Note that instead of rebooting, you can just use launchd to start postfix:

$ sudo launchctl $ start org.postfix.start

After you quit launchctl, telnet to localhost:25 will work.

@huned: nice, I didn't want to reboot.

One small typo though:

$ sudo launchctl

$ start org.postfix.master (not start as above)

Thx again.

/g

Some updates to an aging, but useful post:

Matt Sears' gmail/postfix relay post URL changed, as did the URL Adam's useful postfix commands blog post

As noted above sudo launchctl start org.postfix.master will start it, sudo launchctl stop org.postfix.master will stop it, as will sudo postfix start and sudo postfix stop

And you'll likely want to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf before you do any of this.

Note that to see if it's work you can use this: ps aux | grep postfix

I was originally using this: ps -ef | grep postfix

But it came up with nothing because postfix was running as it's own user. After several reboots I thought it wasn't working but it was.

For anyone still having trouble, try Adam's post which has more details: http://blog.redcoded.com/post/67554541/command-line-emails-with-postfix-on-leopard-10-5-5

Good luck! Brian

Unfortunately, as of Oct 2009, Adam's blog doesn't seem to be hosted at redcoded.com, anymore.

Once the org.postfix.master.plist changes are in (which I'm not sure I needed, in my case), the final step towards getting rid of the "fatal: ... as _postfix" error in the mail log is to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf so that:

1) mail_owner = _postfix 2) setgid_group = _postdrop