here's an easy question for anyone who's set up an email server. i'm suprised i couldn't find the answer to it anywhere on the web.

i'm trying to set up an email server. i have popa3d running as a daemon and would like to be able to check email from my domain.

i also have a webserver running. the domain of the server is mydomain.com and it's host is hostname. it also has several virtual hosts (otherdomain.com). user should receive email from mydomain.com. otheruser should receive email from otherdomain.com.

when i send a test email to user@mydomain.com, it doesn't go through.
when i send a test email to user@hostname it goes through.
when i send a test email to user@hostname.mydomain.com it goes through.
when i send a test email to otheruser@otherdomain.com it doesn't go through.
when i send a test email to otheruser@hostname.otherdomain.com it doesn't go through.
when i send a test email to otheruser@hostname it goes through.
when i send a test email to otheruser@hostname.mydomain.com it goes through.
otheruser can check his email through mailserver.otherdomain.com.

i would like it to work the way it normally does with email servers so that user@mydomain.com and otheruser@otherdomain.com work. could someone help me out?

thanks in advance.

Sounds more like a DNS problem. The popa3d daemon is pop3 only, so I'm assuming that mail is being received via an SMTP server such as sendmail.

Are we talking about the SMTP side?

If the problem is DNS, then this could be the result of incorrect MX records. You should have entries in your zone file as follows:

A hostname xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
MX 10 hostname.domain.com

Of course sendmail (or whatever SMTP server) must be configured to accept mail for the domain not just the host!

Carl.