Hi!
Don't let that smile fool you: I am about to rip my brain out and toss it onto the road! hehe
Background info:
I can not get e-mail to fully function. I have been digging through Google for hours on end for the past 4 days. (so sleepy!)
I have a fresh Mandrake install. I installed pretty much every package that it would allow me to install, to be able to play with various programs. At first, I suspected a firewall issue (since I had installed every security package). After searching, I decided it was likely not a firewall issue:
1) ssh, ftp, and http from offsite to mydomain.com works fine.
2) ssh, ftp, and http going out from mydomain.com works fine.
3) I found postfix activity described later in post.
So I looked further and found that sendmail and postfix were both installed! This even though the install program assured me that sendmail was NOT being installed. sendmail is now uninstalled.
I eventually put this line into /etc/postfix/access:
softhome.net accept
I ran postmap on the file successfully. From that moment, I was able to send mail to my domain from softhome.net without getting a bounce message from softhome.net. The previous message was:
Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied.
That seemed to be the most importand clue so far.
I looked in all of the recently modified log files for more clues. I discovered nothing new that looked immediately useful to me. (more on log files later)
When I looked in /var/spool/postfix/*/.... now, I FINALLY saw some acknowledgement of mail activity: The incoming/ directory had some 0-length files (ls -lrt below) in it, which had timestamps matching my tests. I was thrilled! (for a moment)
I still had no actual mail anywhere on the system. I checked in places such as home, /var/spool/mail, and /var/spool/postfix/*.
I typed this (logged in as user kejope):
echo 'hello' | mail kejope
The active/ directory held a file briefly, then I would see that filename (moved by postfix cleanup?) in defer/ before I could get a chance to cat the contents. Now I could see the contents:
<kejope@mynewdomain.com>: connect to mynewdomain.com[xx.xxx.x.xx]: Connection timed out
The same filename existed in deferred/ now. Its contents look more like an mbox-format file, but not quite. At least I can tell that this is the actual e-mail data. *cheer*
There those pairs of files stayed put. I also saw files that were generated by cron. The timestamps are interesting, but I do not know why, yet:
root# ls -lrt
total 16
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:01 480108.5462
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:02 185613.5492
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:03 895576.5506
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:03 507150.5507
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:04 105581.5532
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:05 745545.5561
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:06 396239.5580
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:07 215771.5617
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:08 845612.5631
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:09 475567.5645
-rw------- 1 postfix postfix 0 Apr 12 07:10 535666.5675
drwx------ 3 postfix postfix 4096 Apr 12 07:11 2/
drwx------ 3 postfix postfix 4096 Apr 12 07:38 0/
drwx------ 3 postfix postfix 4096 Apr 12 08:41 8/
drwx------ 4 postfix postfix 4096 Apr 12 08:57 C/
These files accumulate steadily, so I rm -fR the entire active/, defer/, deferred/, and incoming/ trees every now and then, to have a clean plate of clues to deal with.
mailq shows messages waiting (Connection timed out).
"mail kejope" (and typing in a brief message to send) initiates a cycle of bounced messages (because I have logging turned on for the moment).
So, the ultimate problem is that mail is sitting in the postfix spool, but I never actually see it in /var/spool/mail/kejope (or root, postmaster, etc). I sense that I am one tiny step away from success, but it escapes me. *sigh*
Rather that post large logs here to waste space, let me know which ones might be most useful, based on my descriptions, and I will post the appropriate snippets. I hope that I have been usefully detailed thus far. I am a reasonably competent PC Tech who can understand (or lookup) any concepts that are relevant
Yes, I will update to the most current postfix, etc. soon, but I want to solve this problem first. I have seen so many complaints in the past few days about Mandrake postfix nightmares.I love Linux, but I can not understand why they would ship the distro in a broken form to start with! argh!!
[[And why, oh WHY can't they give me the option to INSTALL ALL PACKAGES??! Why must they force me to spend 45 minutes clicking every singe line??! What ever happened to the Linux idea of "Give him as much power as he wants, just don't blame us if he hangs himself"??!]] *ahem* OK, I feel better now. :>
Thanks so much for anyone who took the time to help with my problem! If you come visit me in Houston, I will buy you lunch.
--Kenneth