macBlogger - Apple Mac Blog

Recently a lot of Dutch ISP’s deceided (without warning) that they wanted to close port 25 connections other then to their own mailservers. By doing that they hope to reduce the spamload on the servers and lower the abuse complaints, and even worse ending up on a blacklist because one of their users fucked up.

But on the downside a lot of business clients who run their own SMTP server couldn’t send out mail anymore. A lot of clients had issues. Most of them solved this on my advice by changing their smtp port to a port above 1024, say 1025. Most of those ports aren’t blocked.

I had a problem, since i travel a lot with my mac i actually wanted the same but easy to install and easy to setup. I googled around and found what i was looking for, best of all it was free aswell: Rapido SMTP

What is Rapido SMTP?
This free utility helps Mac users set up a full SMTP mail server in less than a minute. In fact, RapidoSMTP allows you to turn on the Postfix SMTP server built into Mac OS X, which will allow you to send mail out the command line, from PHP, or from Mac OS X applications like Apple Mail, Eudora or Microsoft Entourage.

Installation
Installation is easy, just download the dmg file, and execute it. Be sure, if your isp blocks port 25, to change the post to a different number.

Is it possible with RapidoSMTP to setup an open relay?
NO. By default, we put the SMTP Open Relay as OFF. Like that, nobody can take control of your Mac and use it as a spam server.

Why RapidoSMTP is useful?
RapidoSMTP is useful for example when you move often with a laptop. You will no longer have to setup a different smtp server to send emails. But this product is also a great tool for developers. For PHP programmers, web designers, and other software developers, it’s often useful to set up a local SMTP server on the development machine and communicate with it through “localhost”. This is because you can let the local SMTP server do the job of communicating with a Smart Host, or set up the SSL connections, if required, or work with the DNS System, without your having to figure out what to do to effect these in your code. In your code, you simply talk to “localhost” and leave it to the Postfix Enabled-SMTP server to do the rest.

Testing your installation after installing and activating the SMTP server.
You can test this using Terminal. First, type in this command:

telnet localhost 25 (or if you set a different port telnet to that port)

If you see a :

Connected to localhost.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 iMac.local ESMTP Postfix

it means RapidoSMTP has successfully set up your Mac to send mail. You can type ‘quit’ at this point to get out of the telnet session. The in your mail.app set the outgoing smtp to 127.0.0.1 or localhost and you are done.

Questions ? Just ask me ! Robbert