I’ve ported mailwrapper to MacOS X. This program, quite common in BSD derivatives, replaces common sendmail-style commands whith itself, doing a lookup for their companion definitions as specified in /etc/mail/mailer.conf, then executing them as required.

This makes it trivial to replace sendmail as your MTA, yet enable at least general compatibility – since the majority of UNIX programs rely on this.

This also makes it easy to revert, changing a few paths in this text file allows you to change your MTA entirely – what downtime?

Many users don’t need sendmail, and moreover, several prefer to use alternative systems such as postfix, or qmail.

Myself, I’ve installed this simple little wrapper on my laptop to replace sendmail, utilizing my own little port of sSMTP to pass off email to my MTA hub. No daemon required! No maintenance is really required – MacOS X updates are trivial to contend with – just replace any overwritten symlinks; if only other things were this easy.

Parts of FreeBSD’s libutil have been integrated into this archive (fparseln and header), a few paths and such have been modified for MacOS X, and a GNU make compatible Makefile is included with the modified sources available here.