mlist@safenet-inc.com wrote:
Having read what both Anders and Joanne had to say about setting up a simple mail server at home, I... um... flipped a coin, and went with Anders' version. So I followed the summary, as ammended in the follow-up message.
Postfix/Cyrus is not the most easy mailsystem to set up, despite what yast may claim. When I set up my system some years ago it took me days to get everything working as desired. And before you submit any real mail to your system you should be able to verify that Postfix/Cyrus are indeed working, before you enable fetchmail on your system.
I started Thunderbird to connect to Cyrus on the same machine. I answered its initial questions with responses that made sense to me at the time. At first it wouldn't connect, so I tweaked saslauth config and tried again. Thunderbird prompted for my password and then made satisfied noises, but no mail appeared in my INBOX (in Thunderbird). I spent a few hours reading stuff in the Cyrus docs and didn't really find anything that I was sure I should be tweaking, so I tried something else.
This ist the part that requires helpful people to have considerable psychic talents.
I figure that all the downloading activity meant I must have thousands of messages SOMEwhere, and I tried to find 'em. I know that Cyrus doesn't use /Maildir, but I read that it _does_ store messages as individual files, and uses databases to handle all the meta info. I looked every place I could imagine, on both /var and my /data partition, as well as in /home (just in case), to no avail. If I've got a load of downloaded mail somewhere, it's well hidden.
If in doubt have a look at the log of Postfix in /var/log/mail.
Meanwhile, I came into my office this morning and found dozens of bounce mails, from all the stuff that I'd sent/forwarded from office to home over the past several weeks. They looked like this: **************************************************** Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
This is the Postfix program at host junkbox.OURHOUSE.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The Postfix program
(expanded from ): Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=localhost.junkbox.OURHOUSE type=AAAA: Host not found
"localhost" ist not a fully qualified domain name, so Postfix adds the value of $myorigin to get a FQDN. You local domain name should have at least on dot in the domain name AND your own system should be able to resolve the name to the ip address. Bounces are bad. If you're really unlucky then all the mails that you fetched were bounced by Postfix and returned as undeliverable to the sender address. If you had a lot of spam in your mail people might start to hate you. (^-^) If postfix still has the mail queued then you should see a LOT of entries with the command "mailq". If so then you're lucky. Again, the logfile will tell you what happened.
************************************************************* Of course, I don't have a remote connection to fix anything at home, so it's going to be doing this to all my mailing lists and getting me disbarred, and possibly tarred and feathered.
Do yourself and everyone a favor and stop fetchmail before the irate mob starts to look for the big wooden neolithic club...
My real e-mail address is kevinmcl-â-magma.ca, my ISP being magma.ca. "Junkbox" is the hostname of the machine on which I've been trying to configure this domestic server, and "OURHOUSE" is a made-up 'domain' that I inserted when it appeared that I had to insert something. I guess that would have been in postfix config (main.cf), but I'm miles away from that box right now, so I can't check. Elefino is the username on that computer. I'm guessing that something, somewhere inserted "localhost" into the mix, because I never wrote that explicitly. Maybe it was a default that I didn't change in some config file, because it was not mentioned in Anders' instructions. Dunno. I thought I read (from Anders) that I should be able to follow his instructions as written to get a working IMAP server, and that if I foolishly _wanted_ to do additional config-file tweaking, that was 'beyond the scope' and asking for trouble.
So, does this mean that my mail never did come in? That 30-to-40 minutes of modem activity and disk churning was for naught? Does it mean that the mail is all lying on my hard disk somewhere but Cyrus-IMAP didn't accept it? Does it mean that Cyrus-IMAP is not working?
The mails probably never reached Cyrus at all.
Or that Cyrus-IMAP has my mail, but isn't showing it to me (via Thunderbird) and isn't acknowledging to Postfix?
At least, when I left this morning, there was no disk or modem activity, so I'll take comfort in the possibility that maybe I didn't also configure an open spam relay while goofing up everything else...
As long as your Postfix is not listening on your internet address you're probably save. In order to really help you send: - the output of "postconf -n" - /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd - the output of "ls -l /var/lib/sasl2" - /etc/imapd.conf - /etc/cyrus.conf Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com