3 Articles tagged “postfix”

If you’ve not been following along, you might have missed it: it appears to me that even today, in 2011, mail systems work much better when setup the old way. Meaning with a local MTA for outgoing mail. With some niceties, such as sender dependent relayhost maps. That’s why I needed M-x mailq to display the mail queue and have some easy shortcuts in order to operate it (mainly f runs the command mailq-mode-flush, but per site and per id delivery are useful too).

The previous article about M-x mailq has raised several mails asking me details about the Postfix setup I’m talking about. The problem we’re trying to solve is having a local MTA to send mails, so that any old-style Unix tool just works, instead of only the MUA you’ve spent time setting up. Postfix makes it possible to do that quite easily, but it gets a little more involved if you have more than one relayhost that you want to use depending on your current From address.

Nowadays, most people would think that email is something simple, you just setup your preferred client (that’s called a MUA) with some information such as the smtp host you want it to talk to (that’s call a MTA and this one is your relayhost). Then there’s all the receiving mails part, and that’s smtp again on the server side. Then there’s how to get those mail, read them, flag them, manage them, and that’s better served by IMAP.