Replacing Sendmail with Postfix on FreeBSD

The following steps can be used to replace sendmail with postfix on FreeBSD.

• These steps seem to work on FreeBSD 5.2.1. They should work on other versions as well.
• The ports collection needs to be installed.

1. Install postfix from /usr/ports/mail/postfix-current:

   # cd /usr/ports/mail/postfix-current
   # make install

   The install will ask to create the postfix group and to enable postfix in /etc/mail/mailer.conf.

   The updated mailer.conf(5) should look like the following:

   # 
   # Execute the Postfix sendmail program, named /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
   #
   sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
   send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
   mailq           /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
   newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

2. Stop sendmail:

   # /etc/rc.d/sendmail stop

3. Disable sendmail:

   1. Disable starting sendmail on boot:

      # echo 'sendmail_enable="NONE"' >> /etc/rc.conf

   2. Disable building sendmail during buildworld:

      # echo "NO_SENDMAIL=true" >> /etc/make.conf

   3. Disable sendmail's daily cron jobs by putting the following /etc/periodic.conf:

      daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
      daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"                                      
      daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
      daily_submit_queuerun="NO"

4. Enable postfix:

   # cd /usr/local/etc/rc.d
   # ln -s /usr/local/sbin/postfix postfix.sh

5. Configure postfix. The following entries in the Postfix FAQ are useful:

   • Running Postfix inside an intranet
   • Delivering some users locally while sending mail as user@domain
   • Using Procmail for system-wide local delivery
   • Root's mail is delivered to nobody

6. Update the aliases db:

   # /usr/local/bin/newaliases

7. Start postfix:

   /usr/local/etc/rc.d/postfix.sh start