I am running a RH FC2 system with sendmail as the smtp service, and dovecot for imap/pop3. In sending test emails on the local system I find that although I can send mail from command line as mail -s "test subject" myemail.address.com, and I can send same from Zimian, I cannot seem to receive mail in Zimian. All email is delivered to the "command line" mailbox. I am running sendmail as a nearly out-of-the-box default config, and dovecot with imap and pop3 but no ssl and using out-of-the-box authentication. Zimian hooks up and sends fine, but even if I send from me back to myself, I have to go to the command line mail client to read my mail.

I have made sure that sendmail and dovecot are running, and used netstat and nmap to make sure ports 25 and 110 are being handled. They are. I am able to telnet to these ports and I get the dovecot signature, so I know they are "live".

So, I find I do not really understand the relationships among sendmail, dovecot and Zimian. Setting aside Zimian for the moment, what parts of the mail send/receive job do each of sendmail and dovecot perform? Where are the interface points? What is going on here that I'm to inexperienced to recognize?

thanks in advance!
Hank

That mean your sendmail is configured properly but your POP3 is not!

To test POP3.

telnet localhost 110
user [your username]
pass [your password]
list

what do you see?

ALternatively use command line fetchmail and see if that works.

I tried telnet localhost 110 and I got nothing. Well, nothing intelligent. I did "get in", and I see

# telnet localhost 110
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.

but that is all. I tried typing in user hankf and pass pwd and list, but got no output. I re-verified with # nmap -v localhost that 25 and 110 are being listened to, and they are.

The commanline fetchmail says "no mail for hankf" but if I type #mail I see two messages for that user.

Any more ideas on what I may have messed up?
Thanks again in advance!
Hank

you're saying you didn't get any welcome message from your POP3 using telnet?? That doesn't look good. As soon as you do a telnet - the server sends a welcome message like version etc etc. Did you get that?

Is your POP3 server looking at the correct mail directory? (/var/mail)

Okay, you got me to thinking, and that is always a good thing. I decided to get radical. I saved off my dovecot.conf and replaced it with a fresh copy of the example script, and started over, one step at a time. I had either tweaked something I should not have, or just messed up, but I had much better luck the second time around. Things seem to be working much better now, except I am having authentication issues from MS Outlook 2000 from "remote" users. Ximian, however, is now functioning, and local delivery seems to be up and running. I had to open port 110 on the firewall to let pop3 in, and now I must figure out what's up with the authentication from "foreign" clients,. Thanks for the assistance!