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Offline Mail Queues w/ Mac OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-often-roaming-powerbooks-and-iBooks dept.

Zorton asks: "After switching to Mac OS X (10.2) for my primary work/play environment I started to customize the system as I would a Linux or BSD system. One of the first things I wanted to tackle was getting mail into the machine and enabling offline mail queuing (as this is a laptop that roams quite a bit). After installing Fink I was happy to see some of my favorite MTAs available. However I was disappointed to discover there seems to be no mechanism similar to /etc/network/if-up.d (or similar). I spent a bit of time poking and prodding the system but the best I could come up with where some library functions listed on Apple's Developer Connection website. Has anyone tried to configure offline mail queues under Mac OS X 10.2? If you have how did you handle telling the MTA to transfer the mail you have queued up?"

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Umm, it's already there... by itwerx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not sure what you're needing to do but the Mail app which comes bundled with OSX does all that out of the box. The mail spools for each user are under their respective /user/joeblow/Library/Mail/Mailboxes They're even in standard 'nix spool format!
    If you need to use a different app just point it to the right folder and let OSX do the rest...

  2. google cache of the man page.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    sendmail -q

    like you normally do....

  3. diffrent ideas by Zorton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    thanks for everyones input

    I think the underlying problem i'm having is the lack of any ip-d up script or anything like that. It seems to be obvious now after reading some of the comments posted, that the short term solution would be to use Mail app or point something else towards Mail.app's mail dir. I still would like to find out how the location manager does it's thing (Under the apple menu -> location). The API for it seems to be very well documented and perhaps I will end up coding something similar to a interface up script. In the meantime all I will do is install postfix and have it default upon startup to offline mode. Then i'll run a cron job about every minute or to check for up interfaces that have come up (ifconfig -u, and check the routing tables). Not quite as elegant as i've done in the past on a debian system using qmail but should get the job done. I think with a system like that I could grab e-mail from my pop box using another cron job (fetchmail?), and have a offline mail queue ready to go.

    What do you think? Has anyone taken a closer look into the location manager's inner workings? I find it difficult to believe apple didn't provide any provision for advanced configuration of the interfaces (changing the MAC address or perhaps the MTU based on diffrent locations and options).

    Thanks