Hello,
I have been thrown into the role of backup system admin without much experience, and today, with the regular system admin away, the email is not coming in. I checked the email accounts on the server and they are empty, so it is not even going through to the server properly. However, the encrypted emails (orders) seem to be coming through. All email seems to be sending fine. As far as I know, there has been nothing changed, so I am at a loss as to determine how to fix this. Everyone is waiting on me to fond a solution, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and I already stop and started vm-pop3d and sendmail, but it did not fix the problem.

Thanks in advance!

How does email reach you? Pulled in or do you run a publicly visible MTA? Anything in the logs? Tried sending a test email locally? From remote? Any errors? Anything in the logs after testing?

At the risk of sounding completely unqualified, I'm not sure how the email reaches the server...how would I find this info? I did send some test emails both remote and locally, and there is nothing obvious showing up in the logs. Although the emails did not come through, the logs show that account users logged on and off to check mail as normal. It is not getting to the server at all as far as I can tell.
I am going to try and do some additional research tonight.
Thanks for repsonding.

Email address is in the form recipient@domain. There are two ways to get mail. You can use a remote pop server (Usually pop), or the pop server can be on the premises, if someone owns their own domain and has a mail server set up on that domain. Email travels by the mail protocol, which is part of the TCP/IP protocol. It travels from router to router until it finds the mail server of the specified domain, such as @enterprise.com. The mail server sorts the mail by recipient, such as mikem@, and places it in mail boxes for retrieval by client nodes. If this mysteriously happened, something probably became corrupted in the mail configuration, the port was somehow blocked on the firewall (port 110), someone recently changed, or tried to change the mail program, and then got mysteriously ill, and couldn't come to fix it; the pop port on one of the routers is blocked (port 110), or the mail transfer program was stopped (MTA).

If you are physically attached to the mail server, by ssh, or directly by keyboard, you should be able to figure out which thing it is by using >ps aux, checking the mail config in /etc, doing a traceroute >traceroute mail.enterprise.com, or whatever the server is called.

Thank you so much! Your infor was very helpful. I discovered that the "real" system admin was playing with the router.

In that case he's a very naughty boy/girl to do that without telling you.
BTW, the main MTA protocol (SMTP) runs on port 25.

Thanks! BTW, if I have a port that is not listening, do you know how I go about getting it back up to listen? I'm trying to get these issues under my belt for future emergencies. The system admin is getting "shady" and they want to avoid calling on her as much as possible.

if I have a port that is not listening, do you know how I go about getting it back up to listen?
A "port" itself doesn't "listen": it's the daemon that is bound to that port. If it's not listening then you restart the service. If the service goes down a lot w/o reason and it should be restarted automagically and you want to be notified when that happens you can install a process watcher like Monit. It's light on resources and can be configured to do quite a lot of checks.


The system admin is getting "shady" and they want to avoid calling on her as much as possible.
Better get the auditing going, then. At least then you can see when she arrives and what she does.

Agree with unSpawn, sound's like you're being groomed to take over, and it could get very political, so be careful.
Also, get some serious reading under your belt asap.
Start with eg http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz. As a sysadmin, chaps 12, 13, 16 & 21 are relevant, although the whole thing is pretty good.
We're here to help.

Thanks very much guys! It's great to have you all here to help us newbies, and much appreciated!