Re: Fixing report-emacs-bug

[Richard M. Stallman]

    Postfix is not running by default on Mac. Mostly the mail programs  
    used (Mail.app, Thunderbird, Mozilla, etc) talks directly with SMTP  
    to whatever host has been configured in that program.

How silly not to provide a command-line program which does the same.
Emacs surely is not the only program that will not work.

    OS X comes with Postfix installed, but not configured. Postfix is not  
    running by default (security considerations).

What are these supposed "security considerations"?  Surely there
is not REALLY a security problem with running a mailer.

    That means that sendmail is installed and accepts messages, but puts  
    them in a queue. Because Postfix is not running, they never get sent  
    off, and no bounce is generated either.

Is there any way to detect that this is the case?
One way is to run ps -ax and see if Postfix is running.
That is inelegant but would be better than failing to work.