Mail Troubles

My mail host is having difficulties that have been exceedingly difficult to diagnose.  If you’d have troubles e-mailing me, I do apologize.  My mail service is through my friend Jason’s Mac, and we’ve been trying to figure this problem out for the longest time.  Basically what happens is postfix decides to stop recognizing local users, and starts rejecting mail saying the user doesn’t exist.  Restarting postfix seems to fix this, but it usually comes back within a few hours.  Even more oddly, rebooting the host sometimes fixes it for weeks and months.

The real trouble with figuring this one out is not having a good google search term.  There are lots of very simple problems with local mail delivery, and this isn’t a very simple problem.  Finding good information through all the reams of people who just don’t have their mail server configured properly is rough.

Hopefully we’ll figure this out soon.  In the mean time, if anyone has experienced anything like this with Postfix running on MacOS or BSD, let me know.

3 thoughts on “Mail Troubles”

  1. Is this on a Xserve or on a desktop Tiger or Leopard system? If its on a desktop system you may be running into a open file descriptor problem — the desktop version severely limits the number available. I ran into this while trying to get Apache running on Tiger, which proved to be useless for any kind of real world loading.

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