Mail Services
Email-related daemons can be put into two categories: mail transport agents (MTAs), which send new email messages to their destination machines, and mail delivery agents (MDAs), which send mail that’s landed in a user’s mailbox to that user’s personal computer.
Mail Transport Agents (Postfix)
A mail transport agent sends email to other computers, most often via the SMTP protocol. Mac OS X ships with Postfix, a program that aims to be an improved alternative to the still more common sendmail program that shipped with previous versions of Mac OS X.
Tip
Run Postfix only if you need to provide mail-sending services to yourself or your network. You don’t need to run this service to simply send email as long as there is an SMTP server that will accept connections from your machine; most ISPs provide mail services on their own servers, for example.
Using Postfix
You can configure
Postfix
to work in two ways on your machine. The first, as a local mailer,
allows you to send and receive local messages, as well as send
messages to external Internet addresses. This mode is useful for
receiving the regular cron reports that get sent
to root, for allowing scripts to send mail, and
for sending quick messages from the command line using the
mail command.
Postfix can also run as a standalone mail server, able to exchange mail with other servers on the Internet. Even if you don’t need to run your own full-fledged mail server, this mode lets you use your regular GUI email client and send ...
Get Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
