Hello LQ, after I finally got my DNS working (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...webmin-798840/) I configured sendmail and created a user to test it with.

When I try sending an email to myself using Evolution, there is a one minute pause then a box pops up asking me for the SMTP password for the user, I enter it but I keep getting this error:
My domain is: radisson.local, and the hostname is linuxserver.radisson.local

These are the settings I used in my user mail account:

sounds like a domains issue. To avoid spam, mail servers don't take mail from anyone - they are fussy (who the hell are you?). Those that take mail from anyone and forward it are called open relays, and blacklisted.

If this is just you at home, laziest way through is to pretend to be on your isp's domain. If your mail server thinks it's isp.com, mail will flow to isp.com and addresses@isp.com will usually work

Sorry, I should have elaborated better. I am currently connected to a closed LAN network for testing purposes, so I am trying to send mail locally from one client to the server, but right now I'm trying to send mail from the server itself.

I hope that made sense.

It seems the authentication type has some issue.

Alright, so I went and researched a bit about the dovecot service and it seems like I have not configured anything in that dovecot.conf, so I went and removed some commented lines.

I also modified the Evolution settings a bit:
In webmin, I have these settings in the Read User Mail module:
I can start the sendmail service without problems, but when I try to start or restart dovecot, I get the following:
Then, I go to the maillog and this entry comes up last:
I'm not sure what I can do to make dovecot start normally, but I also don't know what passdbs is or does?

the problem is solved now but i keep getting error from EVOLUTION cannot connect server. connection refused. please help

Have you tried changing the authentication method to Login? Not all servers should support DIGEST.

I'm sure that DIGEST-MD5 is supported, because there is a little button next to the authentication type box that checks which ones are not supported and it crosses them out.
I tried other supported types though, and it still gives me an error.

The exact error I'm currently getting when I try to send a mail from Webmin:

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forum...ntication.html

In this forum in a discussion, it is suggested to use smtp authentication to be PLAIN LOGIN. So you might want to try that as well.

Another forum with similar issues.

http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/arc...p/t-11645.html

What's in /etc/hosts?

@linuxlover.chaitanya:
Thanks, I looked through those and tried to apply the same solutions to my problem but it still persists.

@business_kid:
Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for the help guys, but it looks like we're scrapping the whole mail server thing since we're having too many problems and its taking too long. So we'll just stick with apache and FTP since those are working fine.

May I say a word here about mail servers?
Postfix seems to me to be one of the easiest to configure. You would be ready for a home for the bewildered before you stand that up - take it from someone who did. On linuxfromscratch.org blfs section there is a compile & configure for postfix that should get you up pretty quick. They also have stuff on all the main pop, imap stuff and hints.

It would be worth a telnet host 25 / nc host 25 and an EHLO to see if it offers DIGEST. If it does, it would then be worth seeing if you can do this by hand - just to rule out Evolution being buggy. I had issues with the check box for 'remember password' screwing with the login settings a while back.

You had some problems with authentication on the smtp server. Probably because the DIGEST-MD5 wasn't set up properly. I haven't used Postfix, or indeed anything but sendmail really. I have to say that looking after a mail server is a lot more work than either ftp or apache.