I’m doing some testing of a Plone site locally on my Mac, and I want to test the registration process. This requires that I have a mail server such as postfix running on my Mac, listening on port 25. Tiger ships with Postfix but it’s disabled by default. I found these instructions for enabling Postfix, so I can now send emails from this local mail server.
This also comes in handy when you are trying to send email from Mail.app or Thunderbird and the network you are on is blocking traffic to port 25. If you run a local mail server, then you can avoid this problem. But be aware that some anti-spam tools will try to do reverse IP lookup, and if they don’t find a fully qualified domain name for your machine, it’s likely that the message will get flagged as spam.
In this case, you can setup an SSH tunnel over a port that is open, and route your SMTP traffic over the SSH tunnel.
Technorati Tags: plone, postfix, macosx
Most providers who block traffic on port 25 do not block port 587, the SMTP submission port…
Over the years, I have used Postfix Enabler and its successor MailServe when I need to use unix mail services. They provide a nice GUI wrapper around mail configuration which I still feel is a dark art.
http://cutedgesystems.com/software/MailServe/index.html
smtpd.DebuggingServer can be very useful for this too, as it means no mail is sent, only printed to stdout. Usage is simply:
python -m smtpd -c DebuggingServer -n :2525
where it should run on port 2525 (defaults to 8025).