Topic: Cannot send or receive email

[jd mays]

Your product sounds great, in theory, but I've installed it EXACTLY as specified and the web server works fine, as does ftp and samba, but I cannot send or receive e-mail from any of the machines on the network.  What is going wrong?  Is there any advice on what I should try at this point?

[Kim Morrison]

EMAIL NOT WORKING:  JD, thanks for posting.  It sounds like there is a small piece in the puzzle out of place.  Have you created accounts for your email users using the web-based manager?  Are the email applications on your desktop machines configured to access the SMTP and POP3 servers on the e-smith server and gateway?  Can you give us a bit more info on the exact symptoms?  Thanks, alot. Kim

[JD Mays]

RE: Problems with mail server
The win95 clients on the LAN are configured to access the gateway via "mail.mydomain.com" but when they try to actually pick up the email they just sit there in suspended animation.  Eventually the connection times out.  I tried replacing "mail.mydomain.com" with the ip number of the gateway and it seems like POP worked but without smtp I can't send myself any mail to pick up with it.  I tried picking up mail with eudora lite and with outlook express.  Initially I thought that the novell protocals installed on the machine were somehow causing a problem, so I tried on a different machine w/o any novell stuff and I had the same exact difficulties; ftp, web, and samba work fine, but no mail.

[Kim Morrison]

Re: Problems with EMAIL Server. JD - thanks for the follow up post and additional email.  It sounds like you may be running the e-smith server and gateway without an actual connection to the internet (i.e. as an intranet and *internal* email system only). is this accurate?  If so, the DNS server will not work and other services that depend on DNS may fail (like SMTP).   Your experiment of switching the domain name for IP address on the POP server suggests that this might be the case.  Although we don't support this configuration, here are some things you can try:   Login as root using Ctrl-Alt-F3.  Edit the file /etc/nsswitch.conf and change the "hosts" line to read "hosts: files".  In other words, remove the nis, nisplus, and dns keywords.  You may then have to update the /etc/hosts file to make sure it contains an entry for the fully qualified domain name of your system (e-smith.roseweb.org?).  The idea is to make the system stop trying to use DNS and instead rely entirely on the /etc/hosts file.  Good luck. Let us know how it turns out.  Kim

[JD Mays]

In regard to the e-mail problems I was having, e-smith was extremely helpful in solving the problem.  The solution:  stop the dns server from initiating at boot.  That's it, works great!

[Justin]

How do you stop it from loading at boot time JD?JD Mays wrote:

> In regard to the e-mail problems I was having, e-smith was
> extremely helpful in solving the problem.  The solution:  stop
> the dns server from initiating at boot.  That's it, works great!