Re: Postfix (Fetchmail and Dovecote) on OSX 10.6.7 ???

[William H. Magill]

On Jun 17, 2011, at 6:58 AM, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:

> William H. Magill wrote:
>> 
>>> But what are your ambitions ???
>>> Mine are rather extensive, as I need to set up several virtual domains,
>>> so it's my intension to use postfix with either mysql5 or postgresql90.
>> 
>> I run my own domain ... mcgillsociety.org
>> 
>> My current mail server is an old Dec Alpha running Tru64 Unix and UW/IMAP.
>> 
>> I also run a webserver on my Mac Mini using the MacPorts Apache2/PHP/MySQL5 installation.
>> 
>> I assume, but don't know that the mail.app on that mini uses postfix to query the Alpha IMAP server
>> but don't know how Mail.app works in that regard.
>> 
>> If it is using Postfix, I don't know, but assume, it is using the native OSX Postfix as I presently have
>> both it and the MacPorts version installed and have not done anything to the OSX installation.
> 
> nope -- Mail.app doesn't use postfix in any way
> 
> Mail.app is a MUA (Mail User Agent)
> postfix  is a MTA (Mail Transfer Agent)
>         completely similiar in fuctionality to sendmail
> actually, Mail.app isn't able to talk to postfix at all unless one
> installs a POP3/IMAP server also - this is why one also needs Dovecot
> 
> the process is this (simplified):
> sending      email : MUA -> MTA
> transferring email : MTA -> MTA -> ... -> MTA
> receiving    email : MUA <- PO3/IMAP <- MTA
> using fetchmail    : MUA <- fetchmail <- POP3/IMAP <- MTA

> seems you might need to get mail transferred from me.com & gmail.com as


I was pretty sure that was what was happening/needed... from the descriptions I saw, one
needed Dovecot and likely Fetchmail (to have the server collect the mail from gmail/me.com).

Also, got this comment from Andrew Long...

On Jun 17, 2011, at 11:29 AM, Andrew Long wrote:

> 
> On 16 Jun 2011, at 20:00, William H. Magill wrote:
> 
>> Is anyone working Postfix on OSX? (10.6.7)
>> 
>> The basic problem is I know virtually nothing about Postfix. There was a time when I was pretty conversant with sendmail on Tru64 Uinx and FreeBSD, but that was 10+ years ago:)
> 
> I tried to get postfix running many years ago, after moving from Linux to OS/X. I stumbled at the first hurdle as the inbuilt DNS client wouldn't retrieve MX information for target mail domains (it was just requesting information from the piss-poor DNS client in my router) and I just gave up trying to get a real DNS system installed on the Mac... however, that was back under Tiger, the situation may have improved since then ;-)
> 
> Regards, Andy
> 
> -- 
> Andrew Long
> andrew dot long at mac dot com



T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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