Hello all.
After about a month of frustrating investigation & experimentation
I am still unable to find out how to get Qmail to send my mail
to sedric.demon.co.uk.
I started from the following files:
90441 Mar 18 23:12 daemontools-0.53.tar.gz
645366 Mar 18 23:13 fetchmail-4.7.8.tar.gz
1024 Feb 27 13:01 install-mail.0.1
480346 Mar 18 23:11 qmail-1.03.tar.gz
117264 Mar 18 23:15 serialmail-0.75.tar.gz
1024 Mar 17 19:12 tkrat-1.2
131538 Mar 18 23:15 ucspi-tcp-0.84.tar.gz
The first attempts being manual following the various installation
instructions FAQs & what-have-you, with a bit of guesswork and
experimentation to try and put the correct entries in the
/var/qmail/control files.
After some time, I ended up with something that would allow me
to mail to local users and would also receive mail from
demon via fetchmail (though admittedly with socket errors showing
up in /var/log/ppp-log) - the 'fix' for this in the fetchmail FAQ
having no apparent effect...
What I then ran up against was a persistant CNAME_lookup_failed
message associated with every qmail attempt to send to an
external address. Apparently, Qmail attempts to do 'DNS' look-ups
unless 'serialmail' is used. As I understand this, it means that
Qmail is not intended for use with dynamically allocated addresses
or dial-up connections, but can be adapted by use of the serialmail
package so that it can then be used.
This seems to have the consequence that qmail will not tolerate attempts
to send mail when the dial-up connection is down, which I can live with
since TkRat has a deferred mail delivery mode.
Having decided that despite repeated re-reading of installation
instructions, checking the installation by hand, running several
perl scripts to validate the installation was leading nowhere,
I removed (tarred) the whole /var/qmail tree , rm -fr 'ed it,
removed the qmail users and source trees and ran install-mail.0.1
- this on the assumption that there was some blunder that I
had made in the setting up procedure which I could not see for looking.
When that had run and sent a test email declaring that mail was
working, I then started up TkRat again, and attempted to send mail
to the one local user that I just set up using install-mail.0.1.
This was refused with a message saying 'not in my list of rcpthosts'
I forced this to work by editing my local hostname into
/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts and /var/qmail/control/locals
Now, a message from TkRat addressed explicitly to rjp@local-host-name
will find it's way back. (That, as far as I can tell is what ought to
happen)
Then I attempted to send to sedric.demon.co.uk again, what I expected
was for the message to find it's way back.
what I actually get is '553 sorry, that domain is not in my list of
allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)'
OK - so I edit rcpthosts to include sedric.demon.co.uk
A message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (again) is now accepted, but (as far
as I can understand it), this message should also find it's way back. It
does not - it gets sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and the
message text is in /var/qmail/alias/pppdir/new.
.qmail-ppp-rjp was not generated by the installation script so perhaps
this is a 'red herring'?
If I introduce a file into /var/qmail/alias/pppdir called .qmail-ppp-rjp
(pure guesswork this) I then find that messages start appearing in
/var/log/maillog:
Mar 20 01:13:12 SedricWorks qmail: 921892392.990956 starting delivery 14:
msg 496 to local [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mar 20 01:13:12 SedricWorks qmail: 921892392.991371 status:
local 1/10 remote 0/20
Mar 20 01:13:13 SedricWorks qmail: 921892393.547002 delivery 14:
deferral: Unable_to_chdir_to_maildir._(#4.2.1)/
/var/qmail/alias/pppdir.qmail-ppp-rjp contains:
/home/rjp/Mailbox/
Ahh------------- This is rapidly becoming another waste of time.
I do not immediately need qmail - since I have this Acorn RiscPC
set- up which works well enough. BUT since the future of Acorn machines
is now in question, I need to look at an alternative. That is what this
is about. I also tried M$ IE4 & did not like that much...
I do use eMail for commerical purposes, so I would not mind paying
for advice. anyone got any ideas on that?
The fact that this list exists at all inspires some confidence there is
at least one set of conditions under which qmail will work..
The question is what are they?
Regards, RJP
-
RJP Personal..
