Dear Friends,

sorry for this lengthy post. I hope you'll manage. I've two servers in different locations having public IPs running centOS 4.4. My domain/DNS in on first server, say example.com. I need to setup mail server for it (exim) on second server which has hostname as host1.anotherdomain.com.

I updated '/etc/named.conf' on first server to point mail server:
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host1.anotherdomain.com. IN A w.x.y.z
example.com. IN MX 10 host1.anotherdomain.com.
mail IN CNAME example.com.
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I've also installed exim (latest) in second server and updated first few lines of exim.conf:
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#domainlist local_domains = @
domainlist local_domains = example.com
domainlist relay_to_domains = example.com
hostlist relay_from_hosts = 127.0.0.1
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Also installed dovecot (latest) for imap access without applying any modification to its config.

Created a test user on mail server (testuser) for testing.

when running squirrmail from domain server, I'm able to login using testuser. But I'm not able to send or receive any mail. when trying to send its showing 'Server replied: 111 Can't open SMTP stream.', its may be due to that no smtp is there yet.

what should I install to provide smtp service?
Is domain and exim (mail server) integration good or needs changes?

guide me plz what to do next to have a fully working mail server...

thanks in advance for every word in reply

Jai
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ek chota mota hindustani

yeah that really was the long way round... so basically squirrelmail can't connect to an smtp server? what have you the local smtp server to? squirellmail won't care about mx records and things, it just needs to connect to a consistent local smtp server, which will then shift the mail on from there. that error normally means there's no smtp server running locally, e.g. postfix, exim, sendmail, or squirrelmail hasn't been told to go to a suitable smtp service nearby.

yeh! I also think so and dont know how... basically what I need:
1) after inserting mx record in dns, is it enough to connect my domain server to mail server? plz tell me.
2) what software should I install to provide smtp service in mail server?
3) run squirremail on domain server to access/send mails.. what next I should do?

plz help me out!

thanks

Jai
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ek chota mota hindustani

1) depends what you really mean by "connect", but ostensibly, if you want to send email for bob@yourdomain.com then a normal smtp server will look up the mx entry for yourdomain.com and send it there.
2) well that's exim, you've already done that..?
3) check the squirrelmail docs. by default i *assume* it's looking for an smtp server on localhost, which there often is. a default installation of exim / postfix should be fine in most cases. alternatively you should be able to configure squirrelmail to explicitly point at a different box.