How To Send Email From the Command Line on MacOSX 10.10.5 Yosemite

Author: erics, Posted January 29th, 2017 at 9:44:55am

I wanted to send email from cron for various reasons, but the emails would bounce with an error 554:
554 5.1.8 : Sender address rejected: Domain not found

Clearly, Postfix was using the “internal” hostname of myappledesktop.local (MacOSX has TWO hostnames! also, myappledesktop.local is not the real hostname ;-).

So, I needed two things:
1. a public FQDN in DNS that mail servers could see and resolve properly
2. to set the sending hostname to that FQDN

For the first, I used my DNS server to create a FQDN with home’s public IP address: myappledesktop.thewyz.net

Then, I edited the Postfix configuration file and set the sending hostname manually:

That did the trick!

No need to run postfix reload, since postfix only runs on-demand, not as a daemon.

As always, YMMV…

Categories: How-To's, Technology Tags: 10.10.5, Bounce, cli, Command line, Email, FQDN, howto, macosx, mail, main.cf, PostFix, Send, tips, Yosemite