Dear all

I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04, with exim4 and mutt installed. I can sucessfully send, receive and read local mail on this machine. I tried to forward the mail from my local account to my external mail address, where I regularly read my mail. I did this by creating a .forward file in my home directory and put in my regular (external) mail address. However, I the messages never find their way to my external mailbox. Any hints or ideas? How can I check what's going on? Do I need to (re)configure exim4? How?


Matthias

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On 23/05/2010 15:07, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
> Dear all
>
> I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04, with exim4 and mutt installed. I
> can sucessfully send, receive and read local mail on this machine. I
> tried to forward the mail from my local account to my external mail
> address, where I regularly read my mail. I did this by creating a
> .forward file in my home directory and put in my regular (external) mail
> address. However, I the messages never find their way to my external
> mailbox. Any hints or ideas? How can I check what's going on? Do I need
> to (re)configure exim4? How?
>
> Matthias
>
Hello,

I did it with a postfix configuration without problem. I created a file
.forward and just put inside the email address.

Can you send a mail to an external mailbox without the .forward file ?
(I guess yes)
You can check the logs in /var/log/ (the files containing mail and messages)

Clément
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On 05/23/2010 09:07 AM, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
> Dear all
>
> I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04, with exim4 and mutt installed. I can
> sucessfully send, receive and read local mail on this machine.

How about non-local mail?
I.e. can you send to, or receive from external sites?
If not, then forwarding to such sites (as in the case of your regular
email address) will likely fail as well.

> I tried to
> forward the mail from my local account to my external mail address, where I
> regularly read my mail. I did this by creating a .forward file in my home
> directory and put in my regular (external) mail address. However, I the
> messages never find their way to my external mailbox. Any hints or ideas?
> How can I check what's going on?

Log files, is exim attempting to connect to the external MX? Is the
external server rejecting the mail, or what exactly is going wrong?

> Do I need to (re)configure exim4?

Probably.

> How?

That depends on the results of the troubleshooting.

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On Sun 23 May 2010 at 15:07:22 +0200, Matthias Brennwald wrote:

> Do I need to (re)configure exim4? How?

Most likely you do. Use 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config'.

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On May 23, 2010, at 3:44 PM, ubuntu-users-request@lists.ubuntu.com wrote:

>> sucessfully send, receive and read local mail on this machine.
>
> How about non-local mail?
> I.e. can you send to, or receive from external sites?
> If not, then forwarding to such sites (as in the case of your regular
> email address) will likely fail as well.

If I try to send to a my external mail account (not through the forward), the mail does not arrive either. I cannot test if I can send from external sources to my local account because I don't have a machine at hand that could do this.

>> I tried to
>> forward the mail from my local account to my external mail address, where I
>> regularly read my mail. I did this by creating a .forward file in my home
>> directory and put in my regular (external) mail address. However, I the
>> messages never find their way to my external mailbox. Any hints or ideas?
>> How can I check what's going on?
>
> Log files, is exim attempting to connect to the external MX?

How can I tell? What is MX?

> Is the
> external server rejecting the mail, or what exactly is going wrong?

How can I tell?

Matthias
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On Sun 23 May 2010 at 22:59:13 +0200, Matthias Brennwald wrote:

> How can I tell? What is MX?

The command 'less /var/log/exim4/mainlog' could help.

> How can I tell?

From reconfiguring exim4 you should know how you are sending
mail to non-local hosts. Why do you think you need a .forward
file?

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On 05/23/2010 04:59 PM, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
> If I try to send to a my external mail account (not through the
> forward), the mail does not arrive either.

Ok, so the issue is with sending in general, not specific to forwarding.
Does it seem to send successfully but just never arrive, or is there a
delivery failure. You may need to look at your logs to know for sure.

What domain is your exim sending (or trying to send) from?

Is your machine's IP listed in the SPF records for that domain?

Is the IP address your machine is using static or dynamic, and does it
have a proper reverse dns? Is it blocklisted anywhere? (If its a
dynamic/residential connection, its quite probably already blocklisted
in one or more places. If its an open-relay its probably blocklisted.
etc)

> I cannot test if I can
> send from external sources to my local account because I don't have a
> machine at hand that could do this.

To: you@your-domain


> How can I tell?

Look in your log files. This is kindof a must.

> What is MX?

Mail eXchanger. A domain has a record or records called MX that specify
which email servers receive its email. So, if you are sending to
so-and-so@example.com your server would need to connect to on of the
MX's for example.com.

Is your machine running on a residential connection? Many (most
perhaps) sites will not accept mail sent directly from such a location.

In this type of situation, one option may be to use your external email
account as a smart-host, rather than forwarding. Even if this is not
the case, the smart host option may still be a good temporary
work-around until you get the necessary setup in place to run an
internet facing email server, such as MX records, reverse DNS, things
like that.

Configure your MTA to authenticate to your external account's server,
and go from there. I don't know if exim has this feature or not, most
MTA's do. (I've only ever used Postfix and Sendmail, but the concepts
are the same.)

Another alternative, if you only need to be able to read your local mail
externally, but don't need to send anywhere else, would be to run a POP
or IMAP daemon locally (making sure the correct ports are reachable
externally) and have your external email account yank the messages that
way. Many webmail providers at least have the option of pulling mail
from pop servers of other sites.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Joe


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On May 24, 2010, at 12:11 AM, ubuntu-users-request@lists.ubuntu.com wrote:

> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 22:31:23 +0100
> From: Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: Forwarding local mail to external mail account?
> To: ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
> Message-ID: <20100523213123.GK860@desktop>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Sun 23 May 2010 at 22:59:13 +0200, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
>
>> How can I tell? What is MX?
>
> The command 'less /var/log/exim4/mainlog' could help.

Here you go:
-----------------------
2010-05-24 08:41:01 1OGRLR-0004Ci-1h <= www-data@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch U=www-data P=local S=1227
2010-05-24 08:41:01 1OGRLR-0004Ci-1h => www-data <www-data@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch> R=local_user T=mail_spool
2010-05-24 08:41:01 1OGRLR-0004Ci-1h Completed
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H2-EW <= brennmat@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch U=brennmat P=local S=575 id=20100524064931.GA16413@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H2-EW == matthias.brennwald@eawag.ch R=smarthost defer (-36): host lookup for mail.wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch did not complete (DNS timeout?)
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H2-EW ** matthias.brennwald@eawag.ch: retry timeout exceeded
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 <= <> R=1OGRTf-0004H2-EW U=Debian-exim P=local S=1505
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 == matthias.brennwald@eawag.ch <brennmat@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch> R=smarthost defer (-36): host lookup for mail.wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch did not complete (DNS timeout?)
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H2-EW Completed
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 => brennmat <brennmat@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch> R=local_user T=mail_spool
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 ** matthias.brennwald@eawag.ch <brennmat@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch>: retry timeout exceeded
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 matthias.brennwald@eawag.ch <brennmat@wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch>: error ignored
2010-05-24 08:49:31 1OGRTf-0004H4-J1 Completed
-----------------------

I don't know why it is trying to talk to mail.wut-ui.eawag.wroot.emp-eaw.ch. I don't think this exists at all (wut-ui is "my" machine, but I cannot recall that I configured anything like mail.wut-ui).

>> How can I tell?
>
>> From reconfiguring exim4 you should know how you are sending
> mail to non-local hosts. Why do you think you need a .forward
> file?

Local system mail mail (root) is sent to my user account. I read somewhere that root/system mail cannot be sent to external accounts.

Matthias


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