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. He was specific about his procedure being intended for a fresh system with no previous mail-related config. So... yes... I reformatted and re-installed SUSE 10.1. Blew away everything, including /home - the only untouched partition was /data. I restarted several times while the installer/updater seemed to be working around the Online Update problems that plagued the early days of the release, and I appear to have gotten all the necessary updates installed. Then I tackled the mail setup following printouts of Anders' e-mails with the instructions. I did as much as I could as root, running SuSEconfig every time I turned around. As part of that effort, I created a link to my /data partition, and (as emphasized by Anders) made very sure that the target directory had the same ownership and permissions as the original mail landing spot in /var. Then I started everything and stood back and let it rip. I had been piling up mail on my ISP for some weeks (still am, since I used the 'keep' option until this is working), so fetchmail went and got thousands of messages. I have no idea where they went, but it took more than half an hour to get them all, via ADSL, the first time. Thereafter, connections took a few seconds, so I'm assuming it was getting mail that hadn't already been retrieved in the first lengthy batch. 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. 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. 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 <elefino@localhost.junkbox.OURHOUSE> (expanded from <elefino@localhost>): Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=localhost.junkbox.OURHOUSE type=AAAA: Host not found ************************************************************* 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. 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? 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... Kevin (unserved, still) PS: Anders, hope your move to Germany went smoothly. PPS: Once all this was working, I was going to set up another address to be <postmaster>. The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. 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