I had to reboot the Mac last night for an update. As far as I recalled, I hadn’t yet figured out how to get postfix (mail server) to auto start on reboot, so I hung around waiting to start it.
As a quick check, once I had the Darwin prompt up I tried sending a mail from the Mac to my regular address. That arrived promptly and I could see the mail in the mail logs.
I realised of course that that is not the same as accepting mail from outside (My Mac performs email forwarding for a couple of domains) so I tried sending a mail from my PC to one of my forwarding addresses. That also arrived promptly. So I figured I was wrong, and that I had actually found a way to autostart postfix.
Today, my forwarding address didn’t work. I looked in the logs and saw:
Aug 7 22:42:12 Fifi postfix/master[290]: daemon started — version 2.1.5
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/pickup[291]: 56AB518C81E: uid=0 from=<root>
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/cleanup[292]: 56AB518C81E: message-id=<20060807214212.56AB518C81E@ns0.mydomain.com>
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 56AB518C81E: from=<root @ns0.mydomain.com>, size=326, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/smtp[295]: 56AB518C81E: to=<steve @otherdomain.com>, relay=mailserver.otherdomain.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx], delay=1, status=sent (250 Ok: queued as E4257168016)
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 56AB518C81E: removed
Aug 7 22:42:56 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: connect from host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: 091D718C81F: client=host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/cleanup[299]: 091D718C81F: message-id=<44D7B3DF.9000606@myexterndomain.com>
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 091D718C81F: from=<public @myexterndomain.com>, size=861, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: disconnect from host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtp[300]: 091D718C81F: to=<sweavo @myexterndomain.com>, orig_to=<steve @mydomain.com>, relay=myexterndomain.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx], delay=1, status=sent (250 ok 1154986976 qp 95562)
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 091D718C81F: removed
Aug 7 22:43:12 Fifi postfix/master[290]: master exit time has arrived
Aug 8 02:15:14 Fifi postfix/postqueue[879]: warning: Mail system is down — accessing queue directly
So it looks as though if your mail server is shut down and you send an email from a Mac, then for a minute after that your Mac is a fully functioning mailserver. In the out-of-the-box configuration this is not a problem but it could have implications for server setups and system admins.
Of course this is not Mac-specific, it applies to any postfix installation.
2 comments so far...
Is that in your inetd config, then? Seems a scary thing to have enabled by default.
Nah, postfix is configured to forward a couple of domains, and is not configured to auto run on boot. But I think what is happening is that if you send a mail on the command line, it wakes up postfix in order to send the mail, and postfix comes up with its full configuration and hangs around for a minute or so… rather than just waking up enough to transmit the single message that you injected. I would have to experiment to confirm this suspicion though, and that sounds a lot like hard work to me.
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