Problem connecting to mail from the outside

[bdragon]

Ok, I'm trying to rebuild my personal server after a major crash. Everything is back up, with one problem.

Email is flowing nicely in and out of the mail server, but I cannot get in to retrieve it from any outside system.

The kicker is that I had the same problem when I build the box originally, and the fix was something in the OS, not the mailserver. Now I can't remember what it was.

My server is Mandrake 9.2, running a Postfix mail server (along with Apache2, ProFTP and SAMBA) My two client PCs are Windows, using Outlook Express (I know, I know, I'm working things on the cheap these days).

I've been crawling the web for two weeks and am at my wits end. I'm about ready to offer up a pound of my homemade fudge to anyone who can help me.

[bdragon]

Eureka!

Ok... I went old-school for a minute. I've narrowed the problem to port 110 being blocked.

The real question now is how do I get LINUX to accept connections on 110?

[MattyMoose]

Are you sure the daemon is listening? do a

netstat -an¦grep 110

, see if it's listening. If not, maybe it's not started? It could be that your ISP is blocking outbound port 110, although I can't imagine that they'd actually do that. My ISP blocks outbound port 25, but not 143/110.

If it is listening, then you'll need to change your firewall rules, and I haven't been keeping up to date on what is actually the firewall flavour of the year for linux (ipfwadm? ipchains? iptables? I've lost track over the years), so I can't help you in that regard, sorry, but I'm sure someone will help out. Something like this may help, though: [iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net...]

Be careful if you're editing firewall rules remotely, too. :)

[bdragon]

Hmmm.... the netstat was negative. I've confirmed that Postfix is running, both through the Services control panel, the Webmin (I can go into the Postfix server through Webmin and get to inbound email and send out email).

I can rule out my ISP because this is all on my local LAN. I've even reconfigured my mail client to the local 192.168 IP of my server. No luck.

I have the OS firewall controls set to all open (yes, I am behind a hardware firewall).

I'll admit it, I'm lost.

[bdragon]

Welp, I fixed it.
I tried issueing IPTABLES commande, explicitly adding the port to the firewall... nothing worked.

I was browsing through the RPM manager, and found that I hadn't installed the IMAP server (why would I? I'm using POP). On a lark, I went ahead and installed it.

Lo and behold, it works. Turns out that the IMAP server also holds the IPOP2 and IPOP3 servers. Who'd-a-thunk it?

[MattyMoose]

Hehe, I know what you mean... You're probably using Courier, correct? I was confused when I first set it up as well... So many things, and it doesn't quite explain why the POP server is in a package called courier-imap. :(

MM