I realize this is wildly offtopic but this is my last hope. I would like to only send mail from my computer, both locally and to remote servers, so I don't think I need postfix to run a daemon, but I can't find anything that will tell me how to configure it. Would anyone happen to know?
+4
A:
Generally it's still useful to have an SMTP server running as a daemon - just make sure it only listens on the loopback (127.0.0.1) interface so that it doesn't accept mail from the outside world.
By running as a daemon, your Postfix installation can continue to manage your outgoing mail queue optimally (for those instances where an outgoing e-mail couldn't be delivered immediately).
Also, some software prefers to make a direct SMTP connection to port 25 on a machine somewhere rather than invoking /usr/sbin/sendmail and piping the mail to that program. Running as a daemon is then preferable to having your SMTP service started on demand via inetd.
Alnitak
2008-12-22 09:50:27
Hmm, so you'd advise me to use the default setup? My machine only has an Atom processor and I don't want to bog it down with unused daemons, would postfix consume many resources running?
Stavros Korokithakis
2008-12-22 09:52:10
no, when it's not being used it should use negligible resources. Mostly it'll use RAM in any case, not CPU.
Alnitak
2008-12-22 09:53:55
If you've got a netbook or something with an Atom, you've probably got at least two or three orders of magnitude more memory than Postfix will use. Don't worry about it.
ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
2008-12-22 09:56:17
FYI, I had Postfix running on a 486 with 16MB of RAM at one point and it only used a small fraction of that, just a few hundered K.
ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
2008-12-22 09:57:51
A:
Just comment out the line starting with 'smtp' in /etc/postfix/master.cf.
bortzmeyer
2008-12-22 12:32:44
A:
You may stop postfix service and remove it from startup services.
If you are using redhat you may use
chkconfig --level 2,3,4,5 postfix off
fsniper
2008-12-26 14:03:06