Thread

I’m moving my development environment to my macbook, and I’m wondering what others are using as a local mail server.  I installed MAMP so I’ve got Apache, PHP, and MySQL, but I still need a local mail server to complete the local dev environment.

I’m currently using the Sendmail option for sending email on my server and others on their dev environment, so I don’t want to change that if possible.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

What’s wrong with the installed mail server?

Back before 10.3 OS X shipped with Sendmail installed, which they have now changed to postfix.  However, there is a sendmail wrapper for postfix in /usr/sbin/ called sendmail - so the php mail() function should work out of the box.  Heck, if you send it to username@localhost you can even test it offline and check your mail in the terminal by typing ‘mail’.

Are you talking about the server or desktop version?  I have 10.5 on my laptop and it doesn’t look like there is an MTA installed and nothing is listening on port 25…

Hmm, I’m still on Tiger, but I"m pretty sure they didn’t remove it.  Try running

sudo postfix start
/* AND/OR */
sudo service smtp start

from the shell.

I’m on leopard and the above commands result in:

service: failed to start the 'smtp' service

Funny thing, I’m certain I never installed it.  Until I upgrade I won’t be able to help much with this issue, but there is a darwin port that you could try.