Questions on postfix

[Ubence Quevedo (thatrat)]

I was just hoping that the postfix would just “work” after getting it compiled, but with Apple doing their own thing with the postfix they ship with macOS Sonoma, it doesn’t look like it’ll be as straightforward a thing as I thought it would be.

This was a nice-to-have and not absolutely necessary for what I would like to do.

I appreciate all of the responses and clarification.

-Ubence

> On Dec 29, 2023, at 1:15 PM, Horst Simon <horst.simon2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> I have MacPorts postfix with amavisd new, spamassassin and dovecot successful 
> working on macOS Ventura and High Sierra by sending external mail through icloud
> and using getmail to fetch mail from icloud, outlook and gmail. I am using submission
> (port 587) to send mail.
> I had to disable the macOS postfix by running “sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.postfix.master.plist”.
> 
> Horst
> 
>> On 30 Dec 2023, at 07:28, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
>> On 29/12/2023 15.28, Ubence Quevedo (thatrat) wrote:
>>> That’s just it, I am using mail from /opt/local/bin/:
>>> uquevedo at ubence-mini-wired ~ % which mail
>>> /opt/local/bin/mail
>>> 
>>> I shouldn’t have to use a specific executable if it’s attaching to a
>>> standard port for a running service…?
>>> 
>>> Unless there’s something configuration wise that I’m not seeing about
>>> what port the postfix from MacPorts is doing…?
>> 
>> mail(1) does not connect to port 25 or 587 by default, if you wanted to
>> imply that. Unless you configured it differently, /opt/local/bin/mail
>> might probably still use /usr/sbin/sendmail, but I am not sure about that.
>> 
>> Depending on your macOS version, it already ships with postfix. The
>> relevant sockets are already bound by launchd to run the macOS postfix
>> installation on-demand. You won't see any running daemon processes as it
>> is only activated by launchd on an incoming connection as configured in
>> the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.postfix.master.plist file.
>> There is no way to get rid of this postfix setup unless you disable
>> System Integrity Protection (SIP).
>> 
>> If your intention is just to set up a relay over an external SMTP
>> server, you could just use the macOS provided postfix. I described such
>> a setup on my personal blog a while ago with a specific setup that was
>> required for macOS 10.12 Sierra, but the general instructions should
>> still apply today:
>> 
>> https://raimue.blog/2018/03/22/postfix-with-relayhost-over-stunnel-on-macos-10-12-sierra/
>> 
>> Rainer