Hi there,

I'm trying to figure out why I can't send email to any of the new accounts on my Linux server (I'll call it my.server.org). I've configured it as best I can, and am able to send mail from the machine to the outside world. When I send an email from, for example, Gmail to root@my.server.org, the email seems to disappear. I have no record that it was ever received by the server.

I am hoping to make this server into one that would support lists (via Mailman) and everything seems to be working perfectly except this one thing. I would greatly appreciate any assistance!

Thanks,
Chris

Perhaps your ISP is blocking the mail ports? This is a common practice nowadays.

note. Your example is somewhat unfortunate if you don't own server.org. If you use a qualified domain name it should be registered in your name. Otherwise sending mail to server.org will never reach you, but the guy who does own server.org. Might be obvious, but I can't read that in your post

Moloko, hanks for the reply. I am in posession of the domain (which is, in fact, something other than server.org). We are currently running an Exchange server for my organization's regular mail system, and this works fine. (I'm attempting to set up a Linux machine to handle mailing lists with Mailman.) So I think that the ISP is, in fact, not blocking the mail ports.

Do you know which ports need to be open in order to allow mail delivery, or whether there is any special configuration of sendmail required to allow incoming mail?

From my limited understanding of all of this, it seems as though I need to have port 25 open on my computer and that I need to edit the sendmail .mc file to allow incoming connections from hosts other than 127.0.0.1. I'm pretty sure I've done both of these things correctly... so maybe I'm missing something else...?

Thanks again.

Chris

martian

This is the line in sendmail.mc you have to change

From this
To this
You then have to create "sendmail.cf", how you do this depends on your distro, restart sendmail

Port 25 needs to be open and if you have a router the port needs to be forwarded to your mail server

You also need MX records setup in DNS for your domain

Pete

Pete, thanks for the tips. I've made the changes to sendmail.mc and recreated sendmail.cf. The software firewall is also set to allow SMTP connections on port 25 (there is no hardware firewall -- bad, I know, but soon to be remedied). And I've modified the MX records on our local server (a Windows Server 2003) to point to the Linux server.

But, after all of that, I still am not able to send email to the Linux server.

Do I still need to notify my ISP about the changes? Currently mail routed to our primary server (example.com) comes through just fine, so I was thinking that mail to lists.example.com would also work.

Maybe I need to wait for DNS propogation? Or does this not apply for MX records?

Thanks again,
Chris

I have two FEDORA CORE 3 system, one is fine, the other one having the same problem as you have
although
dnl # DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
in sendmail.mc
, and dovecot IMAP server is running. I don't get mail from outside of this machine.

(I have not problem to send mail out to any machine.)

Please help

Probably firewall stops you from getting any mail outside of your machine.

If you have KDE or GNOME,
System setting -> Security Level ->trusted services ->check Mail (SMTP)

This solved my problem.