On 11 Jan 2020, at 13:32, Steven Smith wrote:
• Edit /etc/postfix/master.cf as Gerben suggests.
My concern about the second option is that it will never give the
macOS postfix a chance to do what it wants to do a boot time
That gives Apple too much credit, e.g. assumes that someone competent in
Cupertino has thought about the contents of master.cf and consciously
chosen to enable and disable the many available services and components
of Postfix. It is entirely pointless to fire up network listeners for
SMTP and initial mail submission on ports 25 and 587 with the overall
config Apple provides, which is underlined by the fact that the sole
master.cf override for submission cannot work without the specification
of a X.509 certificate which does not exist.
The purpose of the macOS Postfix config is to service the local mail
submission queue, which is expected to function by a universe of
POSIX-compliant software. Unless you do something by hand to hook your
MacPorts Postfix installation into the standard macOS local mail
subsystem, you should leave that useful part of Apple's Postfix in
place. There is no utility provided by its network listeners, so
disabling them is safe.
and I don’t know what the unintended consequences would be.
Thanks to the modular design of Postfix, disabling smtpd, postscreen,
and submission does nothing but turn off those services. Nothing uses
them (or even CAN use them, without modifying the default macOS config)
so there are no secondary consequences.
Also, every time you update the system this fix will get undone.
Well, maybe. Updates seem to create a weird mess of variant config files
in /etc/postfix under normal circumstances and it is not clear to me
from looking at the systems I have available what the behavior is
regarding local changes. Installing and/or using Server.app (e.g. as an
admin client for another machine really running Server) may have
polluted my systems where I have evidence.
Does macOS 10.14+ have an published approach to turn off native
postfix completely?
That should not matter, because 10.14+ (Mojave & Catalina) are entirely
unfit for and hostile to server duties. The best answer to the question
"How do I make Postfix work well on modern macOS?" is simply: "You
don't."
But of course, the answer to *your* question is: NO. Maybe some have
been "published" by people who haven't thought out the details
carefully, but I wouldn't advise using one of those... Apple offers no
useful support for macOS as a server platform aside from the shriveled
remains of Server.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not For Hire (currently)
