Configuring sendmail and imap

T

tehart

Registered
I'm trying to set up sendmail and imap so that I can send and receive mail from tehart1@tehart.net, which is hosted on my machine at home. The mailserver is supposed to be mail.tehart.net.

The problem is that while I can send mail locally, i.e., root to <username>, and to the outside, e.g., <username>@mac.com, mail sent to tehart1@tehart.net gets lost in transit, and I get a bounced message.

So my goal is to send mail from outside to the domain tehart.net.

When I do

nslookup -type=MX tehart.net

I get this response:

tehart.net MX preference = 0, mail exchanger = mail.tehart.net

tehart.net nameserver = ns2.zoneedit.com
tehart.net nameserver = ns4.zoneedit.com
mail.tehart.net internet address = 24.18.170.149

When I do nslookup for mail.tehart.net, I get this:

Name: mail.tehart.net
Address: 24.18.170.149

So question 1. Have I properly configured the MX and A records to achieve the result I want?

Sendmail has a number of files that it gets data from /etc/mail/access, /etc/mail/aliases, /etc/mail/local-host-names, /etc/mail/mailertable, and /etc/mail/virtusertable.

I believe the aliases file has root aliased to tehart1, but not much else.

Question 2. Which of these files need to be modified, and in what way to achieve the desired result?

I can send the files from home if anybody needs to see them to help me troubleshoot this thing.

Thanks,
Tom Hart
 
Sendmail is a big complicated planet that I prefer to visit rarely. I can't help with your whole problem, but I can explain what some of the files are for.

virtusertable
allows you to specify a virtual domain for an email address. In the form of:

email@virtualaddress.com user@realdomain.com

aliases
this file will let you specify aliases for specific email addresses. Same results can often be achieved in virtusertable


local-host-names
specifies hosts which get handled locally. For you tehart.net should be in this file

access
you can specify hosts which can use sendmail on your server.
 
I finally gave up on the sendmail/imap and installed a version of Communigate Pro. I had the same problem, and finally got it resolved.

There were two problems apparently. First, I had the firewall turned on, and even though Brickhouse said that the right ports (25, 110, and 143) were open, apparently other stuff wasn't getting through. So I turned that off, and the techs at Stalker were able to help me troubleshoot the second problem. The second problem was that I was using the DNS for zoneedit in my configuration files rather than the OS supplied DNS. Once that was changed, I was able to receive mail.

All of this is on the verge of becoming moot though, since Comcast will be switching me over to their service rather than home.com, and the addresses will be strictly dynamic.

Thanks anyhow.
Tom Hart
 
No, in fact I can't afford a license. The software lets you run in trial mode until you buy one though. It's fully functional, but puts a message that it's a trial version of Communigate Pro. I can live with that until I can plunk down the $400 or so for a license.

If worse comes to worse, I'll just try to go back to sendmail and imap/pop3, particularly since I may have the biggest part of the problem resolved for now.
 
Oh, OK.

I really like Communigate Pro, but the liscence is a lot for low usage.
Right now I'm just using SIMS.
 
Does SIMS let you run mailing lists? The whole point of the exercise was so I could run one church related mailing list and one academic type mailing list. The people in my church group are defiantly low tech though, despite my screaming at them that it is the 3d millenium and that they should wake up and send some electrons.

As I say the whole question may be moot once the ISP switches over to dynamic IP addressing. I downloaded a DYNDNS program that's supposed to monitor the IP address, so we'll see how that works out.

Oh, and I've appended a note asking for contributions till I can get the license, which is $500 for the rather limited one I need. I expect that I won't get any contributions though.
 
SIMS has a feature called mirror to list, which isn't a true mailing list, but is really just a list of addresses an email would be distributed to.

It sounds like it's a true list, but from what I've read it doesn't work exactly the same, and isn't good for huge lists.

You could probably get by using it for maybe 50 users on an old PPC, or maybe more, I'm not sure.

I haven't tried using this feature before, but I know that adding and removing users from the list is manual, and can't be automated, although it is easy to do anyways.

Basically all you do is create an account in SIMS, open it, and select "Mirror to List" and put in the addresses you want.
 
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