I am running a openSuSE 11.0 OS and i have setup a mail server and apache2 and some other servers. I have tried to send plenty of emails to the server and all i get is a response from the postmaster at my email provider. I realized that the port 25 must not be open in my router, but it was. I also opened port 25 in my firewall, with no sucess. WHen i put telnet localhost 25 i get a connection fine, but from anything else, even on the same network it gives me a connection refused. I read another topic here, and it said to use netstalt -npl and see if sendmail was running. It is with the name sendmail: acce. I really need help with this, i have no clue what is wrong. I have never before successfully set up a mail server and i was hoping this time could be different

P.S. I can send mail to another server fine, just not recieve.

Bman22

Wait, you don't have port 25 open at the router but do on the machine? If you want to receive emails to a domain that this MTA is setup for, you need to have port 25 open to the world to receive email, not just the machine if it's sitting behind this router. Connection refused usually means it's blocked.

i have port 25 open on both the router and the machine, but still not even machines on the network can telnet to it. Nor can ones outside of the network. It is a problem with the machine itself

ok well i found out why i couldn't telnet from a different machine to my server. It has to do with the fact that sendmail is configured not to allow remote connections. I can't figure out what could be causing my problem with recieving mail. If it helps, the current domain that my server is registered to is a subdomain meaning it is not the highest level server on the domain. Would this affect receiving mail?

Have you checked the logs? to see if there is even an attempt of receiving the email? also (you have pop/imap installed as well right?)

yes i checked the logs, and i saw not even a suggestion that the server was getting mail. Also i found out that the whole no remote connections is bad, so im back to square one. Why wont my machine let anything connect via port 25. I had tried turning off the firewall, and tried it then, but we had a huge thunderstorm earlier and it looks like my router lost all of the ip forwarding things so i will try again using the local ip.

ahhhh! I fixed it. Stupidest mistake ever. I had never gotten this far so i didn't know you needed to configure the MTA as well as sendmail. I saw the mta and though mta? ohh Mail transfer agent so i went into yast and set it up, now i can sucessfully telnet to it. Just need to wait until the morning to mess with the ip routing tables on my router to put the server back on the internet.

ok well now that i can test my server, i did and it recieved fine. Issue now is i cant send. Whenever i try i get this:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<"myemail"@"googlesemail".com>
(reason: 553 5.3.5 system config error)

----- Transcript of session follows -----
553 5.3.5 mysite.theserviceprovider.com. config error: mail loops back to me (MX problem?)
554 5.3.5 Local configuration error

Now i have added my server name to local-host-names like i had read, but all of these other topics seem to be about mx and relaying. I can send to localhost fine, just not an outside server. Now i know it isn't MX records because i could send fine before i got receiving working.

I have no clue how to fix this, some help would be very helpful.

bman22