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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?"

6 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. Re:google cache of the man page.... by austad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Out of the box, sendmail is not set up correctly on OS X, at least in 10.2.

    I ripped it out and installed Postfix on my iBook instead. I pointed Mail.app at localhost for it's SMTP server, and even when I'm offline, my mail will queue up. However, the only reason I did this is because my ISP's SMTP server sucks, and I wanted to bypass it.

    Mail.app will already do offline queues, so you really don't need to do anything special. If it can't send a message, it will tell you, and you just click the "Send Later" button.

    --
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  3. Re:google cache of the man page.... by foniksonik · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a few links to help out those who want to set up sendamil correctly (with bind et al thrown in for good measure).

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200 20 825230925806

    Pretty basic, but a quick start...

    http://www.sial.org/sendmail/macosx/8.12.2-jagua r/

    More technical and in depth for those who know and care.

    And of course you can also google for "sendmail os x 10.2" like I did and find other resources.

    --
    A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
  4. Re:google cache of the man page.... by austad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sendmail is the devil, install postfix. Postfix is both faster and much easier to administer (postconf -e command, instead of editing the evil sendmail.cf file by hand). You will have to install some extra packages to get it to compile (like pcre, and the latest Berkeley DB), but it's worth it. Plus, postfix has a much shorter history of security issues, and runs as a non-priveledged user to reduce the chance of something really bad happening if a new exploit is discovered.

    Just google for "postfix os x 10.2" to find install instructions.

    How do I know postfix is better? I built several large mail clusters for a large online financial site using sendmail, qmail, and postfix. Postfix well outperformed the other two (the versions in the last year anyway, qmail used to be the fastest). And with a large number of machines, postfix was a dream to administer.

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  5. 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

  6. Er, configure sendmail? by MrChuck · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've been using sendmail for over a decade.

    UUCP and PPP meant spool up mail, send it periodially.
    UUCP ran periodically (cron), when PPP started up, a startup script would run a sendmail queue runner.

    The only difference here is (1) determining when you are "on the net" via ethernet or wireless and (perhaps) (2) using TLS and SMTP AUTH to allow you to send ANY TIME you are on ANY net - you authenticate yourself to a machine on the net and use TLS to encrypt the transaction. Or setup an IPSec connection to your server. Or use UUCP over SSH (scary, but I've done it).

    Configure sendmail in "queue only mode" and treat it like an occasionally connected machine. This is basic (for mail).