sendmail beginner needs pop3 help

[bkelley]

hi all new to linux and setting up sendmail on redhat 7.1 i can send out through server but when i send to an account on the server it never seems to get to the mail box. is having the pop server running and a valid user enough? also, i never get a return message in my outlook mailbox, so where is the mail actually going? thanks.

 

[RhythmAce]

When mail is sent to a user on your system, it gets put in /var/spool/mail/ in a file with the users name (i.e. /var/spool/mail/joe ). You can check and see if the file exists and open it with mail or even a text editor to see if the e-mail in question is there (all e-mail for joe will be in one file). If it is, then all you have to do is pop it to the client with a pop3 server such as qpopper. Then set up OutLook to use your sever with the users name and password. That should do it. Good luck.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



The easiest way to check if it got there is to logon to a user account on linux (assuming you gave it a real shell !) - or do 'su joe' or whatever - then use 'pine' to directly check that person's mailbox, i.e. command /usr/bin/pine . If you send from pine to a local user and address it to 'joe' it substitutes "joe@localhost.localdomain" so you could try that from outlook and see if that works.



Regards

 

[prairieseahorse]

You may also want to verify a couple of other items:

Does your DNS server have an MX record pointing to your mail server?

If you're behind a firewall, is it allowing SMTP through to your server (TCP port 25)?

Does the DaemonPortOptions parameter in sendmail.cf set Port=smtp and Addr=the IP address of your interface?


Any of these can cause external mail servers to not be able to talk to your server. What will happen then is that the sending server will hold mail until it can either reach your server, or the attempt expires (usually around 5 days).