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20031029 Wednesday October 29, 2003

Panther ships with postfix instead of sendmail I've been using localhost as my smtp server for quite some time on my PowerBook. It hasn't worked for a couple of days, and therefore, I've just stopped sending e-mail when I'm at work (I use my ISPs server at home). Finally, I buckled up and did 5 minutes worth of research to figure out the problem. It turns out that Panther doesn't ship with sendmail (which I previously had configured), but rather postfix - which I've never even heard of. Thanks to a little searching on the Apple Support site, I came across this discussion which has detailed instructions on how to configure postfix. The bonus is and that they actually worked! I still don't know what postfix is, but I assume it's just like sendmail, but for some reason it's better (or why would they have replaced sendmail). Posted in Mac OS X at Oct 29 2003, 11:13:47 AM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

Postfix is great, incredibly easy to install and run AND safe out of the box. Has been default on redhat for a few revs now. Also ver yeasy to integrate with Mailman. Be happy that Apple was smart and ditched sendmail.

Posted by Steven Citron-Pousty on October 29, 2003 at 06:21 PM MST #

Sendmail has a quite obscure configuration file (having a config file so picky that it requires another program to configure it is one clue) and has a poor security history. Postfix is a drop-in replacement that is more secure and easy to configure. http://www.google.com/search?q=postfix+vs+sendmail

Posted by Trent Bartlem on October 29, 2003 at 06:27 PM MST #

Postfix is the fastest open and free SMTP sytem out there, it is a ground up design to be fast and reliable and secure. It is much better than sendmail, we used it for ages for sending milions of emails until we purchased a comercial product (PowerMTA).

Posted by Donal Tobin on October 30, 2003 at 01:00 PM MST #

If you like Java-based solutions for SMTP server, you could try JAMES (Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server) - http://james.apache.org/ which is cool because you can extend email processing using 'mailets' and 'matchers' written in Java, and store users and/or messages in a database if you desire

Posted by Jason Lea on October 30, 2003 at 02:39 PM MST #

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