Hello everyone in Linux land,

I have a small server, up and running becasue of the help from this excellent list, and I have decided to get a mail server going.

After the relative ease of setting up apache and LAN for internet etc. I thought it might be time for a mail server. A, so I dont have to keep diverting emails everywhere (from several email addresses) and B, so I can provide myself and some friends with pop accounts... Several days later I realise setting up a mail server aint quite that easy.

The question is where do I start, and what would be the best mail server to learn on. I use Redhat 9 on the server and slackware on my laptop and other pcs. I have the redhat 6.2 guide and the redhat 9 bible. The bible briefly describes how to set up sendmail and get it running, but I could not seem to get it working. I needed to try harder but I thought I would see what else is out there.

After a google or two it seemed the general opinion of sendmail was that it was full of holes and increadibly difficult to configure.... the bible didnt say anything about this? I gathered that qmail was safer and easier to install, I was wrong. Under redhat 9 qmail needs to be patched in order for some errno thing to work or not, I didnt quite get what I was patching. In the end I abandoned qmail for failure to get around the errno patch thing. I followed the patch instructions exactly, but got a different error after trying again so abandoned mission for lack of any idea how to solve the problem. Freaked out and deleted any trace of qmail.

In short I need to get my mail server up and running so I can start receiving emails again. What is the best mail program for a newbie to learn on?

Hooray for linux!

Lucas

give Postfix a whirl.

Qmail works fine on redhat 9. Edit the following files like this:
error.h:
remove - "extern int errno;"
insert - "#include <errno.h>"

dns.c:
remove - "extern int errno;"
insert - "#include <errno.h>"

cdb_seek.c:
remove - "extern int errno;"

Some of the othe packages like daemontools need their error.h files changed like the error.h file above.

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.

I tried the patch you have pointed out. What I didint get was when I first did the 'make setup check' to compile qmail I got the errno error.

I did the patch with gedit etc. and then did not know whether to recompile or not, so I did, and it gave me another error.

Should I have recompiled with the 'make setup check' again?

Thanks

Lucas

I would start from step one again after applying the patch.

Try it again and post the other error.