I thought this Postfix, Dovecot, Squirrelmail setup was meant to be a breeze! I was wrong

I got to the point where I had all 3 installed and nearly working, but I was getting problems, so I thought it best to uninstall them and start again - easier to trouble shoot 1 or 2 than 3?

My problem:

Postfix is up and running, dovecot is up and running. That's good. What's not good is:

1. The emails I'm sending via 'echo "test" | mail user' , are all going into the /var/mail directory!! I cant seem to stop them going there. I've tried changing my Dovcot.conf and the default_mail_env to 'Maildir: /home/%u/Mairdir/' and the postfix main.cf to 'home_mailbox = Maildir/' , but they still go there.

2. When I mail root, I get a mail file for 'nobody'??

3. The emails are all going into one mail text file, not seperate ones?

4. When I try to connect via mutt, I dont get anything - no emails, folders, anything? When I try via Kmail I get the same.


Please, can anyone throw any light on these problems. Everywhere I've read have made the process for installing these 3 sounds like this:
Apt-get install postfix
Apt-get install dovecot
Apt-get install squirrelmail

Job done.


I tried following this guide and it never worked either: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/275



Can someone please help, this is driving me mental. I thought installing apache, php4 and mysql was fairly straight forward and this would be the same. I'll be heading back towards 2003 server and exchange at this rate and thats why I'm trying to learn to get away from.

I'm a newb as you can tell aswell!




Mors

Hmm...if I remember, I used the default mailboxes in /var with postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail. When I switched to courier/sqwebmail I went to Maildirs. Do you need Maildir?

I was under the impression that Mailbox gave you the single DB sort of information store setup like exchange, where Maildir allowed you give each user and individual DB of their own, in their home areas?

I want the emails to go into the users home directories in single files for each email, format. I just cant get it to happen. The emails come in but just go to /var/mail only. When I log in with any mail client, I cant read any emails for any user.



Mors

You have

home_mailbox = Maildir/

in /etc/postfix/main.cf?

Sorted it. Thanks for trying though kmoffat



Mors