Postfix on Leopard.

Tue 24 Nov 2009

I recently re-installed Leopard on my shiny new MacBook Pro. I use it primarily for development, and at least one of the projects I’m developing needs to send mail. So I wanted to get postfix working.

“Working” means accepting mail from localhost, and sending mail via an SMTP server somewhere. The most obviously accessible SMTP server is gmail, of course.

There’s a few places here & there which tell you bits about how to get the Max OS X postfix working against gmail, but nothing comprehensive. And too many of them involved editing fragile config files.

However, after some poking and prodding, this below seems to do the trick; and all with fairly obviously-reversible commands.

$MAIL_DOMAIN should be some domain you’re entitled to send mail for; in my case, this was simply “eaddrinu.se”. Set GMAIL_USERNAME and GMAIL_PASSWORD as appropriate.

sudo sh -c "
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master OnDemand -bool false
postconf -e myhostname=$MAILNAME
postconf -e relayhost=smtp.gmail.com:587
echo smtp.gmail.com:587 $GMAIL_USERNAME@gmail.com:$GMAIL_PASSWORD >> /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postconf -e smtp_sasl_password_maps=hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postconf -e smtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes
postconf -e smtp_use_tls=yes
postconf -e smtp_tls_security_level=encrypt
postconf -e smtp_sasl_security_options=
postconf -e tls_random_source=dev:/dev/urandom
defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master RunAtLoad -bool true
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
"