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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Sendmail Enabler for Mac OS X 88

Posted by pudge from the but-sendmail-configuration-is-like-totally-easy dept.
gulker writes "It's really nice to be able to use sendmail as a SMTP server on a PowerBook if you move around a lot. But enabling sendmail on OS X is non-trivial, and while a good tutorial exists, the stock Mac OS X 10.2 package is missing the m4 macro processor needed to regenerate sendmail.cf. So it was great news to hear about Bernard Teo's Sendmail Enabler, a cool Aqua-GUI-interface sendmail 'configurator' for Mac OS X."
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Sendmail Enabler for Mac OS X More

Sendmail Enabler for Mac OS X

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  • Sendmail?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by justinkim ( 513188 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @01:31PM (#6523570)
    Just install postfix instead. Secure, easy to set up, right there in Fink. What's not to like?

    • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by EvilDrew ( 523879 ) * on Thursday July 24, 2003 @02:24PM (#6524178) Homepage
      You'll get your wish. The developers release of 10.3 (Panther) uses Postfix by default.

    • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sporty ( 27564 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @03:39PM (#6524976) Homepage
      The fact it's not sendmail.

      It's the case of software once being buggy now being deemed always buggy.

      Remember the various bugs with ext3? Well, let's use the same idea. Ext3 will never be as stable as ext2, especially since it corrupts file systems.

      Or apple. Apple never will make a fast system, since they always lag behind intel.

      Can't we get past these childish prejiduces? Sendmail is pretty friggin cool. At least in sendmail, i can analyze the headers of a message, and if certain ones are present, do one thing vs another. And I don't need a third party util, like procmail to do it.

      • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:4, Funny)

        by hobbit ( 5915 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @03:59PM (#6525189)

        At least in sendmail, i can analyze the headers of a message, and if certain ones are present, do one thing vs another. And I don't need a third party util, like procmail to do it.

        Are you kidding? Do you not understand the unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well"?

        • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sporty ( 27564 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @04:32PM (#6525693) Homepage
          No, I'm not kidding. If we seperated every single piece, you can suffer what some DB schema's suffer from, over normalization. qmail REALLY suffers from this in its goal of security.

          If qmail for instance, since spamassassin doesn't know a thing about the mail system in front of it, it can't tell qmail not to bounce a message from a spammer.. nor can qmail figure this out. So now it bounces mail and then when it can't reach the spamemr, it bounced to postmaster. Joy.

          I understand the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". Do you understand trying to spread yourself too thin? Ever take a look at the redhat configuration scripts? THAT is spreading all of the functionality over too many things, that it is convoluded.

          So let sendmail do what it does well.. process mail. Just so long as it doesn't try to do ftp and my other services as well.

      • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by snero3 ( 610114 )

        I agree with you, Sendmail is extremly powerful if you know how to use it properly IE understand the config file.

        That being said, not a lot of people really understand the config file at all (thus leaving open email relays for spammers etc) where as postfix, although not as powerful, is a hell of a lot easier to configure. Most people I know swap out sendmail for postfix becuase they can use all of the features of postfix and none of the features of sendmail(or very few).

        What is the point of having r

      • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:4, Funny)

        by SewersOfRivendell ( 646620 ) on Friday July 25, 2003 @12:07AM (#6529212)
        It's the case of software once being buggy now being deemed always buggy.

        Please. Sendmail has been providing remote root since 1983 and continues to do so. Just using Google should be enough to scare you away from it [google.com].

        • And you know what, we should also quit the human race. Look at all the mistakes it has made.. just kill everyone in one large felt blast, eh?

          So what were you saying about sendmail? Can't change etc?
        • Somehow I am not worried about someone trying to get remote root on my PowerBook though.

          Maybe I'm not paranoid enough? Perhaps I am just asking to be "0wn0ZeD" or whatever the cool-kids say nowadays...
        • Are you implying, based on the date on this [freshmeat.net] page (which came up in the Google search you linked to), that a sendmail root exploit brought down the WTC?

    • Re:Sendmail?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by davids-world.com ( 551216 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @06:52PM (#6527189) Homepage
      Sendmail crashed / stalled / left-to-walk-the-dog all the time on the powerbook, needed to be rebooted. Sometimes I didn't notice and my outgoing email stayed in the outgoing queue for days.

      After I installed Postfix, everything works like a breeze. Installing Postfix is quite simple -- because there are one or two pitfalls, I wrote a short step-by-step tutorial [reitter-it-media.de].

  • Why sendmail is good for Apple servers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nightlily ( 140378 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @02:15PM (#6524079) Homepage Journal
    I'm happy to hear some allowed us to enable Sendmail. I know there are other SMTP servers out there (Postfix), but Sendmail is not a horrible mail server. Yes, there are bugs (any product that is used will have bugs reported eventually). Now, Exchange server.... that's a horrible mail server.

    The best part about this news is that it gives Mac users more options. Regardless if you like a project or not, the ability to choose between server products helps advance the Apple server platform.

  • It also might not work.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mmontano ( 692182 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @02:20PM (#6524127)
    Turning your own computer into a sendmail server only works if the recipient server trusts you and your machine.

    A machine attached to a dial-up Earthlink account that is trying to sendmail through to an AOL email account looks a lot like a setup for spam.

    As a result, many SMTP servers won't accept SMTP connections from unknown SMTP servers attached to unknown networks.

    (I used to have a similar setup on my PB and used a variety of dial-up/wi-fi internet access and it rarely worked. I setup a private secure SMTP server for me and my friends and it works great.)

    • "As a result, many SMTP servers won't accept SMTP connections from unknown SMTP servers attached to unknown networks."

      I'm not an expert in this but isn't it more a case of mail servers not accepting connections from machines with dynamically allocated IP addresses?

      • Re:It also might not work.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mmontano ( 692182 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @03:11PM (#6524679)
        I've set up a private SMTP server that's attached to a cable-modem and it works flawlessy, yet my Internet IP address is dynamically assigned through DHCP.

        For the major dial-up networks, JoiNet/UUNET/NetZero/EarthLink and so on, they probably assign an advertised (and therefore known) block of IP addresses to dial-up connections.

        There are numerous settings in postmail/sendmail/qmail etc that control who can send mail through SMTP servers. From experience, many of these are enabled to prevent 'random' SMTP servers from relaying mail through them.

        That's why I feel the Sendmail Enabler for Mac OS X could not be the magic elixir that it is tempting to make out of it.

        • Re:It also might not work.. (Score:4, Informative)

          by PoiBoy ( 525770 ) <brian@poihold[ ]s.com ['ing' in gap]> on Thursday July 24, 2003 @04:05PM (#6525245) Homepage
          I have an SMTP server running on my cable modem, too, with a dynamic address. For the most part, it does work flawlessly.

          However, some ISP's, notably AOL, no longer accept mail from dynamic IP addresses. Whenever I try and send email to an AOL address, it gets bounced back to me.

          Of course, I could just relay my mail through my cable company's SMTP server, but this is a good excuse for me to not send email to AOL users.

          • The further skinny is that I relay email only to my ISP's SMTP server, therefore it always goes through.

            Me-(wherever I am) -> My private server at end of cable modem -> Cable provider's SMTP server

            I also have my SMTP server configured to accept mail on a port other than '25' (like 8225), which permits me to use up dial-up providers such as Earthlink which block port 25 traffic from leaving their net.

          • Alternatively, a service like port995.com [port995.com] will give you an authorised SMTP server you can send from, anywhere.

            I've been using it for a year or so, it's fantastic.

    • Re:It also might not work.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by diverman ( 55324 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @04:27PM (#6525586)
      I have been running an SMTP server from my house for a number of years now. Few (if any) mail servers are configured to block delivery from a "suspicious" hostname/address.

      The way it works is that a mail server will only allow relaying (sending mail to a user that that particular server doesn't manage) from a source address that is within it's network/subnet (or other allowed subnets). A server almost always accepts a connection for email to be delivered to an address that it handles (ie. where it's the end of the line).

      Running sendmail (or other SMTP servers) on your local machine will only enable you to queue up your mail. Sendmail (by default configurations) does not attempt to relay the mail through another server. It tries to go directly to the mail server responsible for handling the mail. Essentially, you would have your local sendmail only allow relaying from your local host (or other home machines), and the sendmail server would deliver it to where it has to go.

      THese are not likely to be blocked because they are on dialup. Few people put a system in place that it going to try and "determine" if it's a dynamic or dialup IP address. There's no real way for the sendmail server to know, unless it subscribes to a maintained list. And that would likely result in many failed deliveries, as many lists are not terribly accurate (I've dealt with some for other purposes).

      So, if it doesn't work, it will be for a small minority or emails to be delivered.

      So, maybe you did something wrong. Maybe you had open relaying enabled. THAT is something mail servers will refuse connections for.

      Just my $0.02 on a post I think was mod'd up too much. :)

      -Alex

      • Re:It also might not work.. (Score:4, Informative)

        by good soldier svejk ( 571730 ) on Friday July 25, 2003 @12:59AM (#6529460)
        So, maybe you did something wrong. Maybe you had open relaying enabled. THAT is something mail servers will refuse connections for.
        Actually, AOL has recently started refusing mail from other ISP's adresses (other than their designated relays). here is an example bounce message.

        The original message was received at Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:47:16 -0400 (EDT) from localhost [127.0.0.1]

        ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
        ****@aol.com
        (reason: 554- (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic )

        ----- Transcript of session follows -----
        ... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com 554- (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic
        554- (residential) IP address. AOL will not accept future e-mail transactions
        554- from this IP address until your ISP removes this IP address from its list
        554- of dynamic (residential) IP addresses. For additional information,
        554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
        • And AOL users are constantly not getting emails that are valid emails. An ex-coworker of mine was constantly bitching about not getting important emails from people.

          Sooo... my conclusion... AOL sucks! Oh wait! We knew that already!

          Others may follow this trend. But then again, it wouldn't matter if you just setup your local SMTP daemon to send mail through a relay just like an email client does. Then you use an authorized relay, but still gain the advantages of having your local MTA handle delivering

          • Others may follow this trend. But then again, it wouldn't matter if you just setup your local SMTP daemon to send mail through a relay just like an email client does. Then you use an authorized relay, but still gain the advantages of having your local MTA handle delivering mail.

            You mean like a smarthost entry? Unless I find a third party open relay, I don't see how that helps me. My original problem is that both my relays (work and Comcast) restrict access. So I couldn't use either as a smarthost full t

            • By tone, I get the feeling you are in disagreement with me somewhere, but I'm not quite sure, since I agree with pretty much all you said.

              As for reconfiguring Mail.app? Why? I have all my SMTP servers configured at once, and if one fails, it prompts for the one to use. Personally, I think the default mail server of Mail.app should be tied into the network "Location". Actually, there are a few things that I think ought to be tied to the location.

              -Alex

              • By tone, I get the feeling you are in disagreement with me somewhere, but I'm not quite sure, since I agree with pretty much all you said.

                Sorry, I certainly didn't mean to be confrontational, I just wanted to be clear on what we were both saying. Although I consider myself a competent sendmail admin, and have built mid size (10,000 user) sendmail systems, it is complex enough that I could easily see myself missing a simple solution to my problem. I was trying to discern whether you were proposing one. AFA

    • I've always been confused by this. How does this gain anything? that is, presumbaly no matter where you are home, work on the road you have a ISP somewhere. and you send e-mail via them. If you dont have an ISP then how does send mail know where it can send its packets too and have them accepted?

      • I've always been confused by this. How does this gain anything? that is, presumbaly no matter where you are home, work on the road you have a ISP somewhere. and you send e-mail via them. If you dont have an ISP then how does send mail know where it can send its packets too and have them accepted?

        My ISP, Comcast, nee ATTbi, nee MediaOne, only allows relaying from their own addresses. I have the same policy on my sendmail servers at work ( I accept mail from external sources for internal routing, but no

        • Umhh...I should have mentioned that I use a Powerbook, so I need to send mail from multiple locations. I forget people still use desktops.
      • For one thing, if you run your own mail server you KNOW whether or not your message was delivered. Another thing is that it will be delivered instantly, not 2 or 3 minutes after it was sent, like with some ISP's mail servers.

  • RIP: Sendmail (Score:3, Funny)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @02:43PM (#6524372) Journal
    Just as vsftpd is to wuftpd...
    Postfix is to sendmail...
    Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  • actually, m4(1) is in the Developer Tools (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rich_Morin ( 547665 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @05:27PM (#6526361) Homepage
    ... but you'd still need to grab the Sendmail-specific macro files and such.
  • is sendmail all i need to start sending and receiving email on my own? i have a domain-name and website and I would like to run my own email. if i am running apple's mail, what do i need to do to get email from sendmail?

  • Panter DP comes with Postfix... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just installed the MacOSX 10.3 Panther Developer Preview, and there is no trace of Sendmail.

    Postfix comes installed, and disabled, by default. Nice!

  • What about Exim? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25, 2003 @12:05AM (#6529202)
    I think exim is the best SMTP server for laptops, because it uses very little resources, is a snap to install, and is still highly configurable and very powerful. I use it on my PB12, and I'm very happy with it.

  • Use smtp.mac.com instead... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mactari ( 220786 ) <rufwork AT gmail DOT com> on Friday July 25, 2003 @08:19AM (#6530735) Homepage
    I tend to agree with the assertion that you don't need sendmail on OS X; that's what Mail.app is for.

    The only time I've had a problem with my ISP's own smtp server, Mail.app automatically asked if I didn't want to use smtp.mac.com to send my mail. I don't have a .Mac account, so I was awfully impressed with OS X's desire to get my mail through, rain, sleet, hail, or whatever the bytes were doing today.

    That said, Commando-ing [apple.com] the command line is nearly always a good thing. Setting up a sendmail server is pretty neat for people who might not use Mail.app (wacky mutt users!) or are Darwin diehards -- or just command-line curious. Between Fink [sourceforge.net] and apps like this, you can do what you used to have to be a BSD expert to achieve.

    But check Mail.app out again if you're using something else now. It's a much better app now than it was in OS X 10.0, when it was a pretty simple tech preview of the Address Book and spellcheck Cocoa textareas. And with Panther, the app seems to only be getting better.

  • Ack! (Score:3, Informative)

    by General Sherman ( 614373 ) on Friday July 25, 2003 @05:20PM (#6535629) Journal
    Please, all you people just starting up sendmail on your mac, please, OH PLEASE set it to only allow incoming connections from localhost or set it to have authorization required?

    Don't turn your mac into a spam relay.
  • ...this GUI enabler is optimistic at all times, regardless of what is really happenind in the background.

    Even tho mail isn't going anywhere, the app smiles and promises that all is well.

    Perhaps something else already running on my box is the issue, but when it comes to enabling sendmail, this app will not work 100% of the time.
  • This is the most useful app I've seen in a long time. For months I've been trying to enable sendmail on my home server. Within minutes it was up and running thanks to this FREE app. Thank the makers!

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