It happens all the time. You're in a hotel room, with a nice fast DSL or cable connection, but no mail relay. When I used to tote a ThinkPad, I ran Windows 2000 Server and its SMTP server. Now I tote a PowerBook and, although it comes with sendmail, I've never -- until just now -- gotten it working. For starters, although I'm comfortable with all kinds of software configuration and have run many kinds of servers, sendmail just has never been my thing. Plus, OS X's sendmail is a horse of a slightly different color. James Duncan Davidson wrote a great tutorial that almost got me over the hump, but not quite. Tonight, though, I really needed a solution, and I'd like to thank Bernard Teo for providing it. In the wee hours of Monday morning, he wrote on his weblog:
I put Sendmail Enabler up on versiontracker.com on Sunday. Around midnight, I had confirmation that it had been listed. I went to sleep and woke up to find almost a thousand downloads had occurred. [The Ultimate Business Machine]
I'm not surprised. There was a huge need for Sendmail Enabler, a beautifully-done little OS X app that implements the recipes described in Davidson's article. Thanks Bernard! Your enabler worked like a champ, and you made my day!
Update from Nancy McGough
:For most users it makes more sense to use a remote always-on non-dynamic-IP SMTP server that they can authenticate to using SMTP AUTH. This is:
* easier to set up
* less likely to be blocked by receiving SMTP servers
I am collecting a list of IMAP Service providers here
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/
and many of them support SMTP AUTH.
BTW, Panther is going to use Postfix rather than Sendmail so it probably doesn't make a lot of sense for most Mac users to invest a lot of time learning Sendmail (actually that's probably true for all sys admins these days!).
Excellent points. Thanks, Nancy!
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/07/21.html#a754