Avoid postfix mail delivery issues on a roving Mac

Jun 16, '05 08:50:00AM

Contributed by: oinkachoink

I use my PowerBook both at work and at home, and switching SMTP servers twice a day just to send email was a huge pain. Luckily, I found this hint to enable postfix to deliver my mail directly, and I have been using it for a couple weeks.

However, I noticed that any mail added to the queue while I was at home seemed to have major delivery delays. Eventually I found that email wasn't being delivered at all while I was connected to the internet from home, but would be sent very soon after returning to work. I traced the problem to the fact that my home router receives a hostname from my DSL provider, but my PowerBook within the LAN just had an internal IP and not a valid hostname.

The fix to re-enable mail delivery while my PowerBook had no hostname was to add set of fallback SMTP servers to /etc/postfix/main.cf to pick up the slack when my local smtpd fails to deliver messages. The code to add to main.cf looks like this:

fallback_relay = smtp.yourisp.com, mail.yourcompany.com
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

Comments (3)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050530204525398