Sendmail Enabler for Mac OS X

gulker writes "It's really nice to be able to use sendmail as a SMTP server on a PowerBook if you move around a lot. But enabling sendmail on OS X is non-trivial, and while a good tutorial exists, the stock Mac OS X 10.2 package is missing the m4 macro processor needed to regenerate sendmail.cf. So it was great news to hear about Bernard Teo's Sendmail Enabler, a cool Aqua-GUI-interface sendmail 'configurator' for Mac OS X."

Comments

Sendmail?!

[justinkim]

Just install postfix instead. Secure, easy to set up, right there in Fink. What's not to like?

Re:Sendmail?!

[EvilDrew]

You'll get your wish. The developers release of 10.3 (Panther) uses Postfix by default.

Re:Sendmail?!

[Arthur_5150]

> Well, get ready for Postfix, 'cause it's in Panther in the place of Sendmail I am using qmail since 2 years and i like it, what's difference with postfix ?

Re:Sendmail?!

[davids-world.com]

Sendmail crashed / stalled / left-to-walk-the-dog all the time on the powerbook, needed to be rebooted. Sometimes I didn't notice and my outgoing email stayed in the outgoing queue for days.

After I installed Postfix, everything works like a breeze. Installing Postfix is quite simple -- because there are one or two pitfalls, I wrote a short step-by-step tutorial.

Re:Sendmail?!

[__past__]

No, but unlike qmail, it is Free Software.

Re:It also might not work..

[PoiBoy]

I have an SMTP server running on my cable modem, too, with a dynamic address. For the most part, it does work flawlessly.

However, some ISP's, notably AOL, no longer accept mail from dynamic IP addresses. Whenever I try and send email to an AOL address, it gets bounced back to me.

Of course, I could just relay my mail through my cable company's SMTP server, but this is a good excuse for me to not send email to AOL users.

actually, m4(1) is in the Developer Tools

[Rich_Morin]

... but you'd still need to grab the Sendmail-specific macro files and such.

Re:Spam Relay Enabler maybe

[good soldier svejk]

It's really nice to be able to use sendmail as a SMTP server on a PowerBook if you move around a lot

No, it isn't.

How about, "I want to send out 15 million spams a day for my home based internet business, but I own a mac, what can I do?"

Seriously, you don't need sendmail to send out your email. That's what mail.app is for. Well, if you're not spammer, that is.

Yes it is. Just add,

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

to the m4 file before generating your .cf. That will make sendmail listen only on the loopback address. Then you can point Mail.app at your loopback address and relay from any physical location without any fear of becoming a spam relay. This solves problems for me. At work we don't allow external relaying. Likewise comcast won't let me relay from work. But I can relay off myself no matter where I am or what account I am using. The only problem is that recently AOL has started refusing my messages simply because they come froma NATed address. Bastards!!

You also might want to add.

define(`confDONT_BLAME_SENDMAIL', `GroupWritableDirPathSafe')

Otherwise sendmail will break everytime you run Software Update. You can fix it by chmoding / 755. Alternatively you can add a "chmod 755 /" to the the end of your /etc/rc (since most updates seem to require a reboot anyway).

Back in the day (OpenStep) Mail.app let you call sendmail as an app, but AFAIK it now needs to relay off an address. There may be a way around this but I don't know it.

Re:Could some one explain.

[good soldier svejk]

I've always been confused by this. How does this gain anything? that is, presumbaly no matter where you are home, work on the road you have a ISP somewhere. and you send e-mail via them. If you dont have an ISP then how does send mail know where it can send its packets too and have them accepted?

My ISP, Comcast, nee ATTbi, nee MediaOne, only allows relaying from their own addresses. I have the same policy on my sendmail servers at work ( I accept mail from external sources for internal routing, but not to relay to third parties). So if I am at work I can't relay off Comcast's servers and at home I can't relay off my own. By enabling sendmail in daemon mode on my loopback address (127.0.0.1, but not my public address) I can relay from anywhere no matter what email account I am using. The down side is that AOL has recently started refusing mail from Comcast's user IP range, so I can't e-mail my dad from home. Guess I'll need to move him to a better ISP.

Re:Could some one explain.

[bedouin]

For one thing, if you run your own mail server you KNOW whether or not your message was delivered. Another thing is that it will be delivered instantly, not 2 or 3 minutes after it was sent, like with some ISP's mail servers.

Re:is this all i need

[bedouin]

Well, you can make an alias from your UNIX mailbox, to Mail App's. Mail App uses normal UNIX boxes as far as I know.

Re:It also might not work..

[good soldier svejk]

So, maybe you did something wrong. Maybe you had open relaying enabled. THAT is something mail servers will refuse connections for.

Actually, AOL has recently started refusing mail from other ISP's adresses (other than their designated relays). here is an example bounce message.

The original message was received at Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:47:16 -0400 (EDT) from localhost [127.0.0.1]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
****@aol.com
(reason: 554- (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic )

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com 554- (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic
554- (residential) IP address. AOL will not accept future e-mail transactions
554- from this IP address until your ISP removes this IP address from its list
554- of dynamic (residential) IP addresses. For additional information,
554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.

Ack!

[General Sherman]

Please, all you people just starting up sendmail on your mac, please, OH PLEASE set it to only allow incoming connections from localhost or set it to have authorization required?

Don't turn your mac into a spam relay.