Ever since Ben told me that Postfix was worth a look, I’ve been using it! It’s far easier to get to grips with than qmail and not only is it open source but it’s under constant development. The biggest problems of the moment are that to get TLS you have to apply 3rd party patches, which is a bit of a pain. This is being fixed with the 2.2 tree and so as I’m moving around my household machines I decided to try postfix 2.2 on the machine that will handle mail. It’s not a production machine and the likely mail usage is very light, so the warnings about the code and production machines don’t apply.

The build was fine (as usual) and it installed as easily as normal.

The next step was to get cyrus & sasl working right, which basically meant moving the box away from using the complex mysql based solution that it had (it was used as a testbed for that particular solution which is now in production use elsewhere in an evolved form) and back to a more standard PAM based solution. Quick recompiles and reinstalls follow.

The biggest problem turned out to be that postfix didn’t want to respect the new settings that I had for it in /usr/local/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf. When starting it would try to connect to the mysql db even though there was no mention of it in that file at all! Very strange.

I eventually gave in and rebuilt postfix, reinstalled and restarted. Voila. It all then worked. No idea what changed. Next step is to get the TLS stuff configured then it should be all ready for use when my adsl gets upgraded early next week 🙂