Take the 2-minute tour ×

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?

share|improve this question

migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 6 '11 at 1:37

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

Can you explain why you do not want to run it as a daemon? It would help pick the correct answer. –  bortzmeyer Dec 22 '08 at 12:36

3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Generally it's still useful to have an SMTP server running as a daemon - just make sure it only listens on the loopback ( 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.

share|improve this answer
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 Dec 22 '08 at 9:52
no, when it's not being used it should use negligible resources. Mostly it'll use RAM in any case, not CPU. –  Alnitak Dec 22 '08 at 9:53
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 Dec 22 '08 at 9:56
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 Dec 22 '08 at 9:57

Just comment out the line starting with 'smtp' in /etc/postfix/master.cf.

share|improve this answer

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
share|improve this answer

Your Answer


