Postfix, not receiving mail

[keith morse]

Dirk Moolman wrote:
> 
[unattributed quote]
>>How do you know that it can't receive mail?  Is the mail bouncing?  Are
>>there errors?  Can you telnet to port 25 on the mail server from a
>>different box?

And what, if anything is /var/log/maillog or /var/log/messages showing when a connection attempt is 
made.  Also "tcpdump -i eth0 and port 25" might give some ideas.

> 
> 
> 
> Sorry, I should know better - all good questions.  We have contractors
> sitting here installing an application that needs to receive mail from
> Linux.  My frustration is that they only know their software, and cannot
> tell me how it interacts with Linux, what the errors are, how do they
> know the mail isn't working, etc. - VERY frustrating.
> 
> They are just telling me that Linux is not receiving mail. 
> 

Well at it's core postfix is smtp and troubleshooting smtp is pretty straightforward.

> I spoke to someone who pointed me to this setting in the main.cf file:
> inet_interfaces = 127.0.0.1
> 
> and also to this one in /etc/sysconfig/mail:
> SMTPD_LISTEN_REMOTE="yes"    (was set to no, I changed it to yes)
> 
> 
> Any help you can give me will be appreciated.
> 

Realize of course that we can't/won't troubleshoot in a vacuum.  Thing's like the main.cf in 
question posted to the list would be good or "postconf -n".  If you don't get answers you like on 
this list, you might try http://moongroup.com/mailman/listinfo/mailhelp.  Low volume, pretty 
responsive and non-mta specific, but quite a few folks that do Postfix quite well.  In fact the list 
admin prefers Postfix.