PZ Myers. 2005 Jul 21. Grrr. E-mail.. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/grrr_e_mail/>. Accessed 2005 Dec 15.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Thursday, July 21, 2005

Grrr. E-mail.

OK, I've been bashing my brains out over this mysterious e-mail failure. Any Postfix/Mac OS X experts out there? Here's the problem: I installed a system update to 10.4.2 this morning, and now Postfix is failing to forward any e-mail sent to the site. I've done the usual stuff, checking file permissions and making sure port 25 was working, and those are all OK; I've tried scrutinizing the mail.log file, but I might as well peer at pigeon entrails for all the good that does me.

The really annoying thing about this is that mail sent with submissions to the Tangled Bank or to Grand Rounds for next week won't make it to me, unless they're sent to [email protected]. If you've sent me something since sometime this morning, try again, and I'll try to send an acknowledgment.

Posted by PZ Myers on 07/21 at 08:01 PM
Tangled Bank • Weblogs • 0 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
  1. Did you try going to spymac and posting your question there? There are Mac techs at Spymac and your question would most likely be answered quickly (at least during working hours).
    #: Posted by  on  07/21  at  11:53 PM
  2. When I'm talking to your mail server at pharyngula.org I get a "250 Ok" when I address the message to
    "<[email protected]>" but I get a "554 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied" when I address the message to "<[email protected]>", so this might be helpful:

    http://www.postfix.org/faq.html#virtual_relay
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  12:12 AM
  3. This virtual relay stuff is horribly confusing. It seems to be the source of the problem, though, so I'm poking blindly through it.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  07/22  at  08:48 AM
  4. Hey, I seem to be getting e-mail sent to pharyngula.org again! Huzzah!

    Unfortunately, it looks like anything sent in the last 24 hours is gone.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  07/22  at  08:50 AM
  5. it may or may not be gone, depending on how your upstream relays are configured. if they've been seeing a 24-hour-plus outage, they might just have fallen back to waiting several hours between retries of sending to you, in which case you might get the mail trickling in over the rest of the day. or, depending on just how badly misconfigured your postfix was (and/or your upstream relays), it might have already been bounced back to the senders as undeliverable. hard to tell with SMTP, sometimes.
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  09:24 AM
  6. Yeah, I have to say that the postfix documentation is some of the clumsiest, most opaque tech writing I've ever seen, so I have no clue what I'm doing at this point. I fumbled about and changed a few parameters, and it's working now, but who knows what's going on in the guts of this machine? Not I.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  07/22  at  09:36 AM

  7. This virtual relay stuff is horribly confusing. It seems to be the source of the problem, though, so I'm poking blindly through it.


    I think Wietse set it up that way to scare off the first timers. <grin> Worked on me.

    When I upgraded Postfix from 2.1.5 (Tiger default) to 2.2.3 (and then 2.2.4), everything worked fine,... until I applied Apple's 10.4.1 & 10.4.2 update. Postfix aborted with all kinds of error messages in the syslog. Simply running "post-install set-permissions" restored functionality.

    Don't forget that Apple's default launchd plist for Postfix (org.postfix.master.plist) "shuts down/starts up" the smtpd process every 60 seconds. I unloaded the original, and created my own that mimicked Panther's Postfix StartUpItem. Works like a charm.

    Take any of my advice with a grain of salt. I'm just a old mac geek, who is slowly evolving into an unix geek.

    Hey, maybe I'm the missing link that the creationists refuse to acknowledge exists. Does their blindness extend to operating systems
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  10:03 AM
  8. The problem is obvious. Pigeon entrails don't work for Mac; you need a vole or two.
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  10:09 AM
  9. There's a very simple fix for this problem. I'll send it to you in an e-mail.
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  10:32 AM
  10. I installed webmin that helps you configure a bunch of stuff using a (duh) web interface. You can specify to only allow access from the console. It has been helpful in keeping my Macmini server up and running.

    http://www.webmin.com/
    #: Posted by madbard  on  07/22  at  11:57 AM
  11. the docs for Postfix scared you off? you're a biologist, used to language that's half-Latin and the other half unintelligible, yet you think that text is clumsy and opaque?!

    just you be glad apple didn't decide to go with sendmail, like most other unices used to back before Wietse gave us something halfway decent, straightforward, and simple to work with instead! wink

    (maybe i've just been hanging around other comp sci types too long... naah. we don't use any more jargon than any other specialty, and at least ours is nearly all english...)
    #: Posted by  on  07/22  at  01:40 PM
  12. Oh, but biology is always lucid and informative.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  07/22  at  02:39 PM