[vox-tech] Un-relaying postfix

[Ken Bloom]

On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 05:35 -0700, Gandalf Parker wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > Do I simply remove the "relayhost" line from postfix's "main.cf" config file
> > and restart it?
> 
> My main.cf just has
> relayhost =
> and works directly.
> 
> But for sending, do you need to do that? Ive always understood it that 
> you dont have to have a full daemon running to send. So in this case 
> you should be able to bypass it in some specific scripted cases.
> 
> Have you tried doing direct calls to sendmail sending email to yourself on 
> another system to see if it goes out without relay?
> 
> Im abit surprised PostFix is running on that system at all if its set up 
> to relay. I hope they are using its capabilties in some way. At the moment 
> Im fighting with PostFix because its being abit of a hog on my system. Im 
> trying desperately to teach it to be a tiny tiny server.

Some programs that send mail (most notably mutt) don't speak SMTP --
they just call sendmail and let sendmail do the dirty work. If that's
all you're trying to do, then there are several different sendmail
replacements that can do that without starting a daemon, for example
ssmtp, nullmailer, and esmtp.

On the other hand, it can also be convenient to configure all local
programs to contact localhost:25 when they want to send. If you want to
do that, you need a daemon.