Re: [SM-USERS] Problem receiving mail

[Jonathan A. <ja...@ce...>]

Hello Steve,
On Friday, November 01, 2002, Steve Hoyt wrote...

> I'm a newbie to servers, linux, apache, and squirrelmail so please be
> gentle if my problem is a very basic one.
 
  We try as best we can :)

> My problem:
 
> squirrelmail will send and receive mail between users and it will send
> mail to outside email address but it won't receive incoming mail from
> outside addresses.  As far as I can tell, incoming outside mail is not
> even received at my machine to give to squirrelmail users.

  What you may want to check is not POP3, but SMTP.  From outside the
  network, try:

    telnet <domain name> 25

  If you get a connection refused, then you need to do one of two
  things.  First, check to make sure your router/firewall is
  forwarding SMTP (port 25) connections onto your server.  The second
  is make sure an SMTP server is running on the server itself.  The
  quickest way to do this is from the server itself do:

    telnet localhost 25

  If you get a connection refused here, you know you don't have a SMTP
  server running, or you have a firwall blocking the connections on
  the server itself.

  If you are using an "Out of the Box" RedHat, you are probably using
  Sendmail. If this is the case, you should be able to restart
  Sendmail with the following command:

    /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart

  Then you know you have sendmail started.

> I can connect to my mail server from inside squirrelmail with the
> mail_fetch plugin and I am authenticated with the message "no new
> mail" so the pop3 must be working. I can't find any pages or posts
> that describe similar problems. Please help.

  POP3 is a collection protocol. You use it to _get_ your mail from
  the server. The protocol that receives the mail is SMTP. This is
  where your problem will be located if you are not getting mail from
  the outside world.

  Something else you may want to consider looking into is more related
  to DNS. You have to make sure your domain name has a MX record which
  points to the computer handling mail for your domain. I'm not sure
  if this is a true statement any more, but it used to be if no MX
  record was found for a domain, it'd try the first A record for the
  domain.

  Hope this gives you a starting point :)

-- 
Jonathan Angliss
(ja...@ce...)