Question : Setting up mail server on Ubuntu 8.04

I've never set up a mail server from scratch on a Linux environment, so I followed the guide at http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/. I only did the basic section (for now) to test it, and then I figured I'd go ahead with testing the rest of it.

It's not working, though. From the server, I connect via telnet to port 25 and do the following (my input is bold):

[localusr@godsofdestruction:~]$ telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 ip-68-178-255-52.ip.secureserver.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.14.2/8.14.2/Debian-2build1; Mon, 5 Jul 2010 16:19:44 -0700; (No UCE/UBE) logging access from: localhost(OK)-localhost [127.0.0.1]
EHLO mail.godsofdestruction.org
250-ip-68-178-255-52.ip.secureserver.net Hello localhost [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-EXPN
250-VERB
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ETRN
250-AUTH DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
MAIL FROM: [email protected]
250 2.1.0 [email protected]... Sender ok
RCPT TO: [email protected]g
250 2.1.5 [email protected]g... Recipient ok
DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
This is some random test message.
.
421 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write ./dfo65NJiJG030265 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=151): No such file or directory
Connection closed by foreign host.

I don't understand what this means or where I'm supposed to look. I had assumed maybe it was something with the Postfix data and queue folders. I didn't explicitly set them in the configuration file, so they're using the default Postfix folders which are:

data_directory = /var/lib/postfix
queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix

I checked them out and their ownership is set to postfix:postfix.

Next, I checked out /var/log/mail.log and I'm seeing these:

[localusr@godsofdestruction:~]$ sudo tail -f /var/log/mail.log
Jul  5 16:27:10 ip-68-178-255-52 postfix/postdrop[30249]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/161533.30249: Permission denied

This is on Ubuntu 8.04. Any ideas?

Answer : Setting up mail server on Ubuntu 8.04

Seems I wasn't getting EE emails for a couple days and didn't know you commented - thought maybe you had it whipped. In any case, it may be time again to engage the hosting company and make sure that your server is configured correctly and that the relay server is actually passing the messages along. I can't tell from the message headers if your server or the relay server bounced the email.