Hi Everyone,

I am in the process of trying to set up emails on my server. I have successfully followed the 'Email with Postfix, Dovedot and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.04' (http://library.linode.com/email/postfix ... 0.04-lucid).

Being new to having my own server and relatively new to linux, I took my time with walking through the documentation trying my best to understand each step as best i could.

Naively, i thought that once i had finished the walk through i would be able to use my mail client Apple-Mail or Microsoft-Outlook for example. However this did not work.

I also noticed that there was nothing in the documentation about filtering spam and viruses.

I would like to set up my email so i can use a mail client and also so its safe from spam, viruses and malicious users. Please could someone point me in the right direction?

Regards,
-Ben

I think my problem with setting up my email on an email client has something to do with my MX Records.

When i go to http://pingability.com/ and search my website i get an error on the mail server section. The error is 'There was a problem while talking with the mail server. Got 'ConnectException: Connection refused'

I have done everything explained in the guide in the docs. Does someone know where im going wrong?

Regards,
-Ben

If you would provide the domain name we can help diagnose things, but for now I'll take a wild guess that your firewall is blocking port 25.

Ubuntu provides some documentation on setting up content scanning. Before taking the trouble to install these, I would first recommend some configuration tweaks to Postfix to reject spam. A server I administer uses these (actually, we don't use check_sender_access or reject_rbl_client from that page) and we don't even bother with content scanning. Greylisting is the single most effective measure we use to avoid accepting spam. It does have a downside in that some incoming mail will be delayed.

And if you suspect other ports, try turning off the firewall completely to quickly rule out if it is a port blocking problem or not. That way you don't have to keep guessing ports and risk getting through a bunch only to realize it wasn't that at all.