Hey all,

I'm trying to get PostFix to work on a new Fedora Core 4 install. The postfix service won't start (FAILED) on system bootup and I can't figure out why. I looked over a guide at

http://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patr...iguration.html

and everything seems OK. Am I missing something?

My other questions were these: Is it necessary to set up separate virtual POP3 and SMTP servers, or can just one mail.mydomain.com virtual server handle both directions of communication?

If so (or even if not), how do you "establish" these server(s)? Is it enough to just mention them in the appropriate places in Postfix's main.cf file, or is there something else you have to do beforehand in order to "launch" them so Postfix finds them on system startup?

The goal is to have a mail server which sends mail to/from the rest of the Internet, and which can be reached via a convential Windows-based client such as Outlook. What steps do I need in order to reach this goal? The system will have only one user, so sending mail intra-system is not an issue.

Also, do I need to open port 25 in my firewall for this to work? It seemed on a prior Linux install (FC 3), messages were getting through to other Internet hosts when mailed directly using the mail command at the $ prompt, but the system in question had only ports 80 and 22 open, to the best of my knowledge. It was also able to receive messages from external domains such as yahoo.com. I installed and compiled PostFix manually then (as opposed to during the Linux install this time around) and don't understand why it worked before and not now.

In case it's relevant, the entire system has only a single static IP address on one physical box. Other Internet-related services such as DNS and HTTP are already functioning normally.

Any help and/or recommended resources for beginners would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Matt