SMTP & POP3 on Mac OSX

I need a SMTP & POP3 server for the current project I’m working on. This would be a 10 minute operation to get going on Linux (in all fairness in part due to familiarity).

I selected Exim for SMTP and QPopper for POP3.

Exim

Pretty straight forward, installation process just like on any other *nix. Make sure $PREFIX/var/spool and $PREFIX/var/spool/log and $PREFIX/var/mail exists and are owned by the exim user (compiled into the binary, i just used account manager to add an exim user). Add sticky bit to /var/mail (chmod 1777).

QPopper

Less straight forward, configure with:

./configure –enable-debug –with-pam=pop3 –enable-standalone

The included pam sample file does not work for me, in the end i just copied /etc/pam.d/ftpd to /etc/pam.d/pop3

To test, fire it up on the command line with:

sudo /usr/local/sbin/popper 127.0.0.1:110 -d -t /var/log/qpopper.log -S

which should fork off and create a daemon process.

Write a StartupItem script based on CrashReporter as the documentation suggests, here’s my interpretation:

[xxx@xxx QPopper]$ cat QPopper
#!/bin/sh##
# QPopper Daemon
##. /etc/rc.common

StartService ()
{
        if [ "$QPOPPER:=-YES-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
                /usr/local/sbin/popper 0.0.0.0:110 -d -t /var/log/qpopper.log -S
	fi
}

StopService ()
{
        killall popper
}

RestartService ()
{
        StopService
        StartService
}

RunService "$1"

Tab stopped working in Firefox

Just mysteriously overnight.. used to work just fine. The problem persists on all pages I’ve visited, restarts made no difference. No upgrades has happened in the mean time that I know about. Seems like I’m not alone.

UPDATE: I don’t have the specific extension mentioned in that forum post but I uninstalled a few old extension that I still had floating around, restarted firefox and voila, problem cured.

More money and happiness

The New York times published a story about money and happiness yesterday. I liked their conclusion.