Hi there,

First off, many thanks for all the great posts which have allowed me to get this far without asking a question. I'm very much a linux newbie of two weeks, but this is how I'm set up (I'm hoping this post might help other people).

Linux Redhat 9.0 installed on a PC connected to the net through an ADSL router (using Nildram).
Nildram supply one fixed IP address (195.112.*.*).

I've configured the router to act as a DHCP server for my two other windows machines, and I've set a static ip of 10.0.0.1 for the linux machine (outside of the DHCP address range for the windows machines).

I've set the Primary and Secondary DNS using the routers internal system, and have a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0

I registered a domain (mydomain.biz) and manage it with zoneedit.com. I've then used zoneedit.com to point mydomain.biz and www.mydomain.biz to my fixed IP (195.112.*.*)

My ISP closes port 25, so I've used zoneedit to forward all email for mydomain.biz to a pop3 email address supplied by my ISP.

In the router I've mapped port 80 to goto the internal IP address of the Linux machine (10.0.0.1)

I've added the line "10.0.0.1 www.mydomain.biz" to the windows machines in the windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

Very happily I can now browse www.mydomain.biz from the windows machines and externally, so this is good news.

I want to use squirrelmail to check any email received for mydomain.biz.

I can log on as a user to squirrelmail and this is where my problems start.......

1) I can send and receive emails using ximian when configured to collect pop3 mail and send using my isp's smtp server.

2) I can receive email into squirrelmail via the Linux Imap server, but I think I need to set fetchmail up as a daemon to regularly collect the mail from the external POP3 server. I hope to get this working myself, as I do get mail when I run fetchmail manually.

3) I've set squirrelmail to send email via sendmail, but when I send email it disappears but doesn't actually get sent.

I really need help (and I think the following is possibly where the problems lie??)

1) I've configured sendmail to use a smarthost of smtp.nildram.co.uk. I have a feeling that nildram will only accept my email when it knows who I am. In MS Outlook I need to enter a username and password to send email via nildram. How do I configure this so that Sendmail can do the same?

2) Remembering that Nildram blocks Port 25, do I need to open up any other ports in my router?

3) This is tested by accessing squirrelmail on another windows machine on my network, would that effect it?

4) Nildram (my ISP) allow me to change my reverse dns, so I changed it to mydomain.biz (does that help or hinder?)

This is a copy of abit of my linux mail log when I try to send email;

pr 26 15:39:36 prod imapd[1481]: Login user=pierss
host=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
Apr 26 15:39:37 prod sendmail[1482]: h3QEdbJM001482:
Authentication-Warning: mydomain.biz: apache set sender to pierss@localhost
using -f
Apr 26 15:39:37 prod sendmail[1482]: h3QEdbJM001482:
from=pierss@localhost, size=535, class=0, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<1873.10.0.0.2.1051367976.squirrel@www.mydomain.biz>,
relay=apache@localhost
Apr 26 15:39:37 prod sendmail[1482]: h3QEdbJM001482:
to=<test@test_email_address.co.uk>, delay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=30492,
dsn=4.4.3, stat=queued

Sorry that the post is so long, but having tried lots of different resources, I haven't found anything that has cured the problem.

Many thanks for any tips;

Piers

"Nildram blocks Port 25" yes but that is likely to be just incomming trafic.

Check your folder structure by running the squirrelmail configuration.
/usr/share/squirrelmail/config/conf.pl
(I think that is the path)

What Imap server are you using? I had a similar problem with courier - squirrel was puting outgoing mail in "Sent Items" rather than "Sent" once it was changed to sent and the users (and the skel folder) were given a "Sent" directory with cur, new and tmp subdirs it worked fine.

David,

I'm running uwimap server and Squuirelmail config has the following setup;
1. Domain : localhost
2. IMAP server : localhost
3. IMAP port : 143
4. Use Sendmail/SMTP : Sendmail
5. Sendmail Path : /usr/sbin/sendmail
10. Server : uw
11. Invert Time : false
12. Delimiter : detect

Looking at my directory folder structure for users I only have the following;
/home/pierss/mail
The mail directory contains three files; Drafts, Sent and Trash.

The Sent file is full of stuff (previously tested emails), but none of these actually got sent.

Are you saying that I should create three new directories (sent, cur, new and tmp under the following;
/home/pierss/

?

Thanks for the input so far.

No - That is for the courier mail folder structure. I'm affraid I haven't used uwimap. I woul'd check the folder setup in squirrelmail as well - at work we used the defaults for courier but I guess they were wrong (or different in our version).

If messages are failing to send take a look for a file called "dead.letter" (I'm not sure of the case or location) As far as I can remember from solving another problem is that this is where all undeliverable messages are stored.

I can't find a dead.letter file or similar, but did find loads of files which look very mail related here;

/var/spool/clientmqueue

The emails maybe get to this directory but don't get any further....

Solved. - sendmail is now working fine.

The problem was my speedtouch 510v4 router wasn't able to resolve mx records in dns.

I'd set the linux pc to use the routers primary and secondary dns, but this didn't work.

As soon as I changed my linux pc to use my ISP's primary and secondary dns servers, everything worked.

Thank you for all the help.