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Enabling the Postfix Mail Daemon on Leopard

September 9, 2008 Chad Woolley

If you want to send SMTP mail via localhost on Mac OSX Leopard (for example, from ActiveRecord/Rails/CruiseControl.rb/etc), you need to run postfix at boot. This took me a quite a while to figure out, so here is what worked for me on a work-imaged box and my personal box. YMMV.

  • First, Leopard comes with postfix, but I had numerous issues because I had the MacPorts version already installed on all my boxes for whatever reason. Here are the various error search strings for future googlers:
    • fatal: file /opt/local/etc/postfix/main.cf: parameter mail_owner: user postfix has same user ID as _postfix
    • fatal: open /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory
    • fatal: open /opt/local/etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory
  • So, I ended up uninstalling the MacPorts version: 
    $ sudo port uninstall postfix
    • Strangely, after this, I still get a version @2.5.4 returned by “sudo port list postfix“, even though the uninstall was apparently successful. I don’t know enough about MacPorts to know why, maybe this is reporting the Leopard-installed one???
  • Next, I edited the plist file to start postfix automatically on boot: 
    $ sudo vi /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist`
    • Add these entries at the bottom, in the ‘dict’ element 
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true>
<key>OnDemand</key>
</true><false>
</false>
  • Reboot
  • Make sure SMTP port 25 is open on localhost
    • $ telnet localhost 25
    • Look for something like the following, showing you connected successfully on localhost: 
      Trying ::1...
telnet: connect to address ::1: Connection refused
Trying fe80::1...
telnet: connect to address fe80::1: Connection refused
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 citestbox.localhost ESMTP Postfix
    • Hit Ctrl-] to get to the telnet> prompt
    • Type quit to exit

And that was it! CruiseControl.rb was now sending email from OSX, which was all I really wanted in the first place…

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