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Tony Adams
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Postfix - a mail server
I just set up a Postfix email server. It was somewhat fun and only mildly annoying. It took about 0.1% as long as it recently took to set up a sendmail server. If I was a bit more cynical, I might suspect that the free version of sendmail is intentionally obtuse in order to help with sales of the non-free version. If I was even more cynical, I might suspect that the sendmail documentation is intentionally terse so help sales of the book.

When I heard that Apple was switching from sendmail to Postfix in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), I was simultaneously thrilled and dismayed. I had invested weeks of time learning sendmail arcania and was finally getting a grip on it. I am in the inner circle! I compiled my own sendmail server because the stock Apple version did not support SASL authentication fer chrissakes! And now it has been replaced with a server that *anyone* can administer? An outrage. But upon further consideration it occurs to me that there are things I'd rather be doing than administering a mail server anyway.

Apple set up Postfix to be easily useful for someone who may be on the road or whatever and who just needs a quick and dirty solution for sending email. At the same time, they were careful to not make it easy to accidentally make the server available to spammers or other bad people.As a result (i think) the default settings were not easily modified to make the server work for all the clients in my LAN or for authenticated external connections. So I got to spend some time pulling out my hair anyway. Getting SSL working was pretty non-trivial until I found this article, which spelled out all the steps pretty darn clearly. I am not running OS X Server, so I just skipped step three.

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