Howto send mails from localhost through a smarthost on OSX¶
You’re getting weird errors like “Connection refused” from your local smtp library? You may have to reconfigure your local mailer.
Smarthost¶
Setting up your Mac to use a smarthost to send mails through is not very hard. I found a nice howto on this site: http://fuerstnet.de/en/sending-email-local-development-machine-using.
I’ve copied the central lines:
sudo postconf -e relayhost=your.isps.mailserver smtp_use_tls=yes smtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes smtp_sasl_password_maps=hash:/etc/postfix/smtp_auth tls_random_source=dev:/dev/urandom smtp_sasl_security_options=noanonymous
sudo sh -c 'echo "your.isps.mailserver username:password" >> /etc/postfix/smtp_auth'
sudo chown root:wheel /etc/postfix/smtp_auth
sudo chmod 600 /etc/postfix/smtp_auth
sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/smtp_auth
Problems¶
I noticed postfix is quitting after 60 seconds. So if you send yourself a
test email using: echo "test" | mail -s "test" your@email the postfix
daemon will quit after 60 seconds and you’ll get these errors when trying
to send mails through localhost in Plone:
Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 119, in publish
Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 42, in call_object
...
Module Products.SecureMailHost.SecureMailHost, line 166, in send
Module Products.MailHost.MailHost, line 144, in send
Module Products.SecureMailHost.SecureMailHost, line 276, in _send
Module Products.SecureMailHost.mail, line 102, in send
Module smtplib, line 244, in __init__
Module smtplib, line 310, in connect
error: (61, 'Connection refused')
Solution¶
You need a persistent postfix! Open
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist and check the
programm arguments. They contain -e 60 by default and that’s the exit time
of the master process which is described in master’s man-page as follows:
-e exit_time
Terminate the master process after exit_time seconds.
Child processes terminate at their convenience.
So let’s modify this org.postfix.master.plist file:
sudo vim /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
Remove these programm arguments and add the RunAtLoad statement to startup
automatically (remove highlighted lines):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.postfix.master</string>
<key>Program</key>
<string>/usr/libexec/postfix/master</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>master</string>
<!--
<string>-e</string>
<string>60</string>
-->
</array>
<key>QueueDirectories</key>
<array>
<string>/var/spool/postfix/maildrop</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true />
</dict>
</plist>
Restart your postfix daemon using the commands below or reboot and it should not exit any more:
sudo launchctl stop org.postfix.master
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
sudo launchctl start org.postfix.master