MailServe helps you set up a fully functional mail server on Mac OS X that can:

• send outgoing mail
• receive incoming mail
• fetch mail from an ISP mail server
• filter out spam
• store all these mail on the server & and allow them to be read them from any mail client
• allow mail to be organised into folders and sub-folders
• authenticate users before they are allowed to send mail through the server
• encrypt mail coming in and out of the server using SSL

MailServe organises each of these tasks—from the simple to the complex—into discrete panels in its user interface. This allows the user to turn the mail services on one-by-one, and turn them off individually when they're not needed.

MailServe does a lot of complicated configuring of your server beneath its Mac-like user interface. It does this in a non-invasive manner, touching as little as possible of the original system files so as to leave your system in its pristine state. And you can remove all the files installed by the MailServe, at one go, using the De-Install option in MailServe's Help menu.

Once you have launched the latest version of MailServe, save the current config using the File->Save menu item, do a De-Install from the Help menu, which removes all the previous cruft, and then quit and come back to the app. You'll then get the config files, libraries and the other stuff that will work with Monterey.

Installing a Mail Server on OS X - A Step by Step Guide

Step 1—Sending Mail to other Mail Servers, using the Outgoing Panel

Mail servers talk to each other via SMTP. MailServe includes its own build of the Postfix SMTP server. But it needs to be turned on. So, start at this point—at MailServe's Outgoing panel—to turn on that SMTP server. Once it's on, you can use it to send mail to other mail servers, as well as from things like PHP scripts, running on your server. [Details]

Step 2—Receiving Mail from other Mail Servers

The Postfix SMTP server will also receive mail from other servers. But you need to first tell Postfix which domains to receive mail for. You set this up using the Mail Server panel, which also allows you to set up Postfix so it will relay mail for other machines on your network, as well as for remote machines which authenticate. [Details]

Step 3—Setting up POP3 and/or IMAP Servers using Dovecot

Once Mail has been delivered to the Postfix server, you need to have a mechanism whereby mail clients like Mail, Entourage or Thunderbird can access the stored mail. This service is provided by POP3 and IMAP server called Dovecot, not Postfix. IMAP servers have an additional functionality over POP3 servers—they allow the user to organise the messages into a folder/subfolder structure. [Details]

Step 4—Setting up Fetchmail

Fetchmail is useful for people who have many other POP or IMAP servers that they read mail from. Fetchmail can be set up to check these other POP or IMAP servers periodically and download all that mail, consolidating them into one single mailbox on the local server. [Details]

Step 5—Spam Filtering & Mail User Accounts Management

The Spam Panel includes controls for managing spam and setting up user accounts. MailServe uses procmail to integrate Postfix with Dovecot and SpamBayes to implement spam filtering. The mail administrator can set up custom procmail directives to be processed before or after spam processing. [Details]

The Mail Log

The Mail Log Panel provides access to the Postfix and Dovecot logs (Option-click for Dovecot log). It also shows the current versions of Postfix, Dovecot and Fetchmail that's installed by MailServe.

If you Shift-click on the Get Mail Log button, you can get a list of the currently active Postfix parameters (Command-click for active Dovecot parameters).

The Mail Queue

Use this panel to monitor the mail queue. The Get button retrieves information about messages in the mail queue. You can flush the queue or choose a particular message to delete—useful for when there are messages stuck in the queue.

De-Installing MailServe

You can de-install MailServe by using the menu item, shown below, in the Help menu. It will shut down any mail-related service that is still running, and remove all files installed by MailServe.

MailServe works from its own folder in /usr/local/cutedge/postfix, in which are stuffed the main.cf, master.cf and other files used by Postfix. The original Postfix files in /etc/postfix are left un-touched and so MailServe leaves your system in its original state after de-installation.

Release Log

15.0 November 8th 2021. MailServe for Monterey released. The current Postfix version on macOS Monterey  is 3.6.2. MailServe includes Dovecot version 2.3.16. The Fetchmail version is 6.3.26+SSL.

15.0.1 November 10th 2021. The 6.4.21 version of Fetchmail did not work. Reverted to the last good version of Fetchmail (version 6.3.26) which is Intel only and needs Rosetta on ARM Macs. Fixed a problem with the SASL2 library which caused Postfix not to be able to authenticate with a relay Smart Host. Added the ability to show or hide the passwords in the Smart Hosts and Fetchmail table views. You need to De-Install from 15.0 to use this version.

15.0.2 November 10th 2021. I figured a way to do without all this Full Disk Access stuff. You can delete the ‘com.cutedgesystems.Helper.MailServe’ line in Security & Privacy -> Full Disk Access. There’s no need to De-Install from 15.0.1 to use this version. Now MailServe works the way it always has.

15.0.3 November 12th 2021. Cleaned up deprecated code and the user interface. Made the Smart Host list easier to set up and maintain, and kept in sync with the chosen Smart Host. No need to De-Install from 15.0.1 or 15.0.2. 

15.0.4 December 7th 2021. User deletion from MailServe didn’t work because of the need to give Mailserve "Full Disk Access” in System Preferences. If this hasn’t been turned on, MailServe will now present the user with the Security & Privacy -> Full Disk Access pane. Look for the com.cutedgesystems.MailServe entry and turn that on. No need for De-Install to use this version. If you don’t want to turn on Full Disk Access for Mailserve, create and delete users only from the Users & Groups panel in System Preferences.

15.1 December 31st 2021. Happy New Year! MailServe now supports DKIM. Just one button to enter or create the DKIM keys. And a checkbox to enable the DKIM option. Then Restart Mail Server. Just 3 steps. The details can be found on the Outgoing panel page.

15.1.1 January 1st 2022. Added a Delete ALL (Deferred) button to the Mail Queue Panel.

15.1.2 January 2nd 2022. Check for Updates leads to the MailServe for Big Sur page, not Monterey, when there is an update. This is fixed in 15.1.2. Sorry.

15.1.3 January 2nd 2022. DKIM. I set the default DKIM Selector to “mail" for when we are generating a new key pair, but not when we’re saving previously created keys. I assumed that the Selector field will always be entered in the latter case, but I forgot that, if your current selector is also “mail", you might assume that this will be what is written, even if you entered nothing (which is the correct assumption, since there is Placeholder text saying just that, except that I forgot to implement it). This is fixed in 15.1.3. 

15.1.4 January 4th 2022. DKIM will now work with Additional Domains. If Enable DKIM is on, just enter the other domain names that your mail server will host into the Additional Domains field and Restart Mail Server. MailServe will set up the mail server to sign keys for the other domains in addition to the primary domain. However you must make sure to also set up the DKIM TXT records for each of these extra domains at their respective name servers. Be aware that it may take time for these new TXT records to propagate thorugh the Domain name System - so DKIM on MailServe may take a while to work, while waiting for the DNS records to propagate. 

15.1.5 January 7th 2022. Added an Alert warning when you click the Generate DKIM button because it will take at least one trip to the DNS System to update the _domainkey TXT record. 

15.1.6 January 26th 2022. Fixed the File->Open command which did not work.

15.1.7 March 30th 2022. Apple “retired” Python2 in Mac OS Monterey 12.3. Spambayes requires Python2. This version includes an Intel build of Python-2.7.18 in /usr/local/cutedge/python to make Spambayes work again. This needs to run in Rosetta2 for ARM Macs. Consequently, this version of MailServe introduces a startup check that will launch Rosetta2 on ARM Macs, if it is not already running. All paths to /usr/bin/python must now point to /usr/local/cutedge/python/bin/python. To get these changes automatically, simply launch this version of the app, which will install python in /usr/local/cutedge and patch the three places that pointed to /usr/bin/python inside MailServe. All the user has to do is to Restart Mail Server and restart the Spambayes training job, if this is set.

15.2 June 15th 2022. MailServe will now save the DKIM keys, as well as the Procmail scripts. When you move your saved configuration file to a new system (File->Save menu item), open that file (File->Open menu item) on the new system, and do a Start or Restart Mail Server.

15.2.1 June 17th 2022. Needed to include both the Additional and/or Virtual Domains when DKIM signing and key tables are being generated.