How To: Enable Mamp Pro 2's Postfix for sending email from your Lion iCloud account

Tue, 11/15/2011 - 17:30

If you have Apple's me.com (now iCloud) email service, you'll likely already have setup your Mail program for sending and retrieving your day-to-day email messages. But what if you want the Drupal site on your MAMP PRO 2's localhost to be able to send out emails directly from PHP? Can't use Apple's Mail app for that, no way. You gotta use Postfix.

Apple packaged Postfix with it's new Lion (10.7.x) operation system, and contrary to what you read on the Apple Knowledge Base http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4864 you don't have to pay $50 to upgrade your laptop to Lion Server in order to meet the SSL encryption demands of iCloud (formerly me.com). You can do it through MAMP Pro 2's Postfix control panel! This is how it should look:

What's going on behind the scenes? Well, the Postfix control panel above is editing the MAMP PRO template file at ~/Library/Application\ Support/appsolute/MAMP\ PRO/main.cf (view it and manually edit it using MAMP PRO's File > Edit Template > Postfix main.cf menu item). When the Postfix control panel's "Change Postfix Configuration" button is clicked, MAMP PRO 2 updates the template file for you, then writes the contents of the template file directly to your system's /etc/postfix/main.cf and performs a soft reboot of the Postfix daemon for you. Cool, eh?

Password reset emails from your localhost Drupal site!