Mail server problems
 

Hello,

I am trying to setup a mail server and I seem to be having some problems. I am using Postfix and it seems to be running just fine. My problem is that I CAN send emails out of the box, like to hotmail, but I cannot receive them. I am basically using the default settings for postfix, except for a few changes in /etc/hosts and /var/spool/postfix/etc/hosts.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thank you,

Error messages?

I don't believe so. I do eventually get one back from hotmail saying that the message could not be delivered.

To save hair loss it's probably worth double-checking that the box running Postfix can be accessed from outside ('ping -a myserver.mydomain' from somewhere else).

I think that by default Postfix won't be set up to receive mail, nor to accept mail for the domain, so you'll need to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf to do this.

I tried pinging my server from an outside source and it pinged just fine.
I also tried sending a local email to one of the other users on my system and apparently local emails both send and receive. I checked out the main.cf file and I think that all of the default stuff should work. Is there anything that I definitely need to change?

Does Postfix send and receive emails or does it use other programs to do some of the work? If so, maybe it's the program that handles fetching outside emails coming in?

Thank you.

Thats what I mean.. usually the returned mail you get back that your trying to send will have detailed info on why it couldn't be delivered.

I setup postfix about two years ago and I had to add a few lines to the main.cf file for smtp authentication, that will allow you send email from outside your subnet. I don't know for sure if that's the problem your having, but in case it is you can find lots of how to info on the net. Check out this link..

http://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patr...ilclients.html

As trickykid says, the error message will probably indicate exactly where things are going wrong, so perhaps you could post some of the text.

Postfix can handle the whole process, but if you are using your distro's default configuration it's probably locked down to some extent; e.g. to deliver mail from foreign systems to local spools may require 'inet_interfaces' to be edited in main.cf, and 'mydestination' for Postfix to accept mail for the domain itself.

Here is the message I receives from postmaster@hotmail:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
====================================
Delivery to the following recipients failed.

trent@elderainmud.com
====================================

Now in main.cf I changed my inet_interfact from...
inet_interfaces = localhost
to
inet_interfaces = $myhostname, localhost

Now I am getting the error message 'postfix: fatal: parameter inet_interfaces: no local interface found for 24.145.135.166' when I type 'postfix reload'

Any ideas?

Thanks

Try changing your main host and domain name in your configuration to elderainmud.com and or mail.elderainmud.com as I tried sending email to your address and it was returned "host unknown" almost immediately. Its either that on your server or your MX records are not setup correctly.

Well, I officially give up. Thanks to everyone who helped me. I can see no reason why I can't receive emails. Again, thank you for your time.

Already, we just started. Did you try anything I just mentioned? Oh well.. its simply at the DNS level or just a small configuration error on postfix's side.

Good luck..

Yes, I did try what you mentioned in the last post and nothing seemed to work. I am completely new to linux so a lot of stuff that you guys say just goes over my head. I tried modifying a few things in main.cf and master.cf and nothing seemed to work at all. I checked my configuration in my Mandrake Control center and the servers Host name is set to elderainmud.com.

I checked my MX records and they are 'elderainmud.com points 1st to domain elderainmud.com' I also did a 2nd one 'mail.elderainmud.com points 2nd to domain elderainmud.com' and it didn't seem to affect anything.

Maybe if I post my main.cf file on the internet maybe one of you could point out any errors?

www.elderainmud.com/main.cf

Thank you for your help..

Shouldn't this:

#myhostname = elderainmud.com

Read like this to work:

myhostname = elderainmud.com


If you've been trying to run postfix with that current configuration and the myhostname commented, it doesn't know what its own servername is most likely.

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to also uncomment this and put the correct value in it:

#mydomain = domain.tld

I changed the two fields you mentioned above and did a 'postfix reload'. I then tried to send myself an email from hotmail and instantly got back an email saying 'Delivery Status Notification'