How to Send Emails From Local With Postfix and Mamp

If you’re anything like me, you love to work locally building websites without relying on a live server, but this can present some drawbacks such as limiting the full functionality of your site, specifically, the ability to test outgoing emails. In this post I will show you how to take your development even further and without bounds by enabling the ability to send emails from local with Postfix.

I use MAMP Pro which comes packaged with postfix, however I needed some additional tweaks to get it going smoothly. I tried many different ways to make postfix work out of the box with MAMP, but alas I was unsuccessful. A major bummer, because has a “lazy developer” I like the easy straightforward approach as much as the next dev.

Step 1. Setting up a working Postfix MAMP configuration

These instructions are working for me on OS High Sierra with MAMP version 4.4.1

Open the terminal and enter the following command

$open /var/log/mail.log

This will open the mail log console where you can follow along for warnings and errors.

Open the file /etc/postfix/main.cf in your favorite editor

$open /etc/postfix/main.cf

Add the following lines at the bottom of the file.

relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = plain
inet_protocols = ipv4
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom

Step 2. Create then edit the sasl_passwd file to allow authentication with your Google Account

Enter this command in terminal:

$sudo vi /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Add the following lines

[smtp.gmail.com]:587 [email protected]:yourpassword

Step 3. Enter the following commands to restart postfix

$sudo chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
$sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
$sudo launchctl stop org.postfix.master
$sudo launchctl start org.postfix.master
$sudo postfix upgrade-configuration

Next, reload Postfix.
$sudo postfix reload
$sudo postfix flush

Test that the configuration is working

$date | mail -s testing [email protected]