Hello everyone,

I went completely Linux back in October of 2003 after settling on a specific distribution. Since then I have learned quite a bit and am leaning something new everyday. I've got my personal web page up, IRC chat server, and I am working on my own private, home-based e-mail server.

I am having an issue with Fedora Core 2 allowing me to get a e-mail server up and running. I like using Evolution as my MUA and Sendmail, to send, and Dovecot as the MTA, to receive.

I am behind a DSL router which also functions as a small network switch for the other computers in the house. I've been able to send out e-mails but not receive them. The router receives its IP from Quest and it uses DHCP internally with port forwarding enabled.

Does anyone here use Fedora Core 2 and know how to manipulate the various settings to make an e-mail server work in a home-based environment? I've tried all the things I know. I have spend a good amount of time, several weeks, trying to get this to work. For some reason I am missing a step in the sequence.

I would sincerely appreciate any suggestions, advice, walk-through, notes, or related info to get this e-mail server up and running. I am just a small, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere computer user working on getting my little business off the ground.

Troy

troy banther, a.k.a. satyagrahi
"banther-trx.homeunix.com"
troybanther@plateautel.net

Welcome to LQ.

The first thing to check is if you ahve forwarded port 25 from your router to your server. This will allow other hosts to communicate with your server. Most likely you will also want a dns service set up. There are quite a few dynamic services which can help you do this such as http://www.dyndns.org or http://www.no-ip.com

Assumng that you have done the above - does your DNS resolve correctly? Do an MX lookup with:
dig mydomain.com MX

This should then point to an A record like mail.mydomain.com - in turn this should resolve to the IP of your server:
dig mail.mydomain.com A