I've been reading about how to set up an email server on my system.

I am able to send and receive using mutt.
And I can send using Evolution.

I have a question: sendmail listens on port 25 (smtp) for incoming mail...how does imap work into the equation? If sendmail grabs the email and sends it to my local spool, how do I get cyrus imapd to do its job?

Basically it would be nice if someone could lay out in newbie terms how sendmail and cyrus imapd work together and how Evolution should interface with that.

Oh and I've set this up on FC3. And I am able to use the cyrus user to create mail databases for my users. I just don't know how they can access them....

Anyway, help would be appreciated.

Maybe more details would be helpful.

I changed my sendmail configuration so that it should be using cyrus. There are several googles to be found about that.
Sendmail is running, cyrus is running.... I used cyradm to create users and their mail directories (no children, but just the top directory). I used saslpasswd2 to assign passwords to those users.

How do I use evolution to access mail that is delivered by Cyrus-imapd's deliver binary?

And changing my sendmails configuration (to use cyrus for local delivery) has stopped the regular local delivery of messages. At least as far as I can tell.

Any suggestions?

Sounds like you've more or less got things set up correctly, so all you need to do is configure Evolution to connect to your server and tell it to use the IMAP protocol (port 143 for normal, non-SSL IMAP) and Cyrus should be able to respond and give you your mail. If that's not working right, please post an error message.

Basically, sendmail is responsible for sending and receiving mail via the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). Once sendmail receives a message, it calls upon the Local Delivery Agent (LDA), which in your case in Cyrus, to deliver it to the proper mailbox (I'm not 100% sure of how this works because you can configure an alias to send mail directly to a file, which is how I set up virtual user mailboxes on my servers). Cyrus is the program that listens for requests for IMAP clients (i.e. Evolution, Outlook, etc.) and sends the messages to them for display to the user on a remote computer.

Cool. Things appear to be working now at both the local level and over the internet.

Now if you have the time to give me a few other pointers that would be appreciated.

Do you have any suggestions for me in terms of making sendmail more secure? For instance, I don't want to be a relay for spam so how do I turn that off? I think that I already did this successfully by commenting out the following line:
dnl #FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl, but I'm not a sendmail expert What other entries can I add to my sendmail.mc to improve security?

Even though I just got this working, should I use postfix? And is that difficult to setup?

How does spamassasin work? Does it create a "rejected" mail spool that I should check periodically? Or does it just mark emails as being spam? And if so, how do I "tell" spamassasin that an email is ok or not? I only ask because I have enabled (I hope...if I set up the config file correctly!) bayesian filtering which learns over time.

Can I send my emails that are stored under Thunderbird to the cyrus server? I would like to have access using Evolution so that I can eventually choose between the two. (Maybe I just have to send all those mails to myself? Sounds like a big pain.)

If I think of anything else, I will post Thanks for your time.

Ok. Now this is definitely an error. What am I not doing?

Error while Scanning folders in "IMAP server localhost".

Unexpected response from IMAP server: A00001 BAD Please login first.

I got too excited. I cannot receive exterior emails.

I have no clue what I am doing incorrectly.

I can send email using evolution so my isp is not blocking port 25. I can use cyrus's deliver to send test mails from one user to another. I just cannot receive emails. I cant send mail from hotmail or gmail to my email server. My firewall has a hole poked in port 25. What else could be the problem?

Do I need to edit my host file? Do I need to use the domain name that my isp gives me in order for sendmail to accept mails properly? This must be it. I can't think of anything else. Any tips on how to edit my domain name? Would that be in the /etc/hosts file?

Maybe DNS is not able to resolve my domain name, which is the default that my isp gives me, to my ip address. Maybe if I set up my own dynamic dns domain I can get everything to work. In that case, can someone tell me what I need to do in order to make sure that sendmail recognizes my new domain? Do I simply need to edit my local-host-names file?

Ok Sendmail gurus if I look at my sendmail que by using /usr/sbin/sendmail -bp I get the following:

iAM6l7ul001162 161 Mon Nov 22 00:47 <exteriormail@gmail.com>
(makeconnection_ds: unsafe domain socket /var/imap/socket/lmt)
<me@my.domain.com
iAM6k3Fw001119 80 Mon Nov 22 00:46 <exteriormail@gmail.com>
(Deferred: No such file or directory)
<me@my.domain.com
iAM6eotm001073 3 Mon Nov 22 00:40 <exteriormail@gmail.com>
(Deferred: No such file or directory)
<me@my.domain.com

Now I changed the real email entries (of course). So what does this mean? The me@my.domain.com matches exactly the email address that my external emails receive when I send them a message from my box. So when I get these replies are they not being resolved correctly back to the user who should be receiving the messages? In other words, is there a file that I need to put my.domain.com along with my username so that mails to my domain get mapped to my user? (Or am I not making sense? This has been a three day battle )

Yes, the messages that I have been trying to send are all sitting in my que, undelivered. Now....WHY? Man, I am finally getting down to what is going wrong

I think I have it. Sendmail uses the following m4 file to setup its sendmail.cf file:

/usr/share/sendmail-cf/mailer/cyrusv2.m4

In the above file if no arguements are given for CYRUSV2_MAILER_ARGS in the
sendmail.mc file-->

***in the cyrusv2.m4 file***
ifdef(`CYRUSV2_MAILER_ARGS',, `define(`CYRUSV2_MAILER_ARGS', `FILE /var/imap/socket/lmtp')')
(at least that is what I think that means...you know, the ,, in the above implies to me that sendmail.mc has no definition in itself for the mailer arguments)

then sendmail assumes that lmtp will be located at the above location. It isn't, of course, on a FC3 system. So I'm going to try /var/lib/imap/socket/lmtp instead.

Hope that works.

One could also just change the sendmail.cf file if one were so inclined.

That fixed it.

If anyone should be googling for the answer and come to these posts, I apologize for how disorganized my thoughts are. I hope that they are clear enough to understand. I'm too lazy to clean it up

Incidentally this is a good link:

http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/networ...mail/index.htm

as is this:

http://www.irbs.net/internet/info-cyrus/0304/0430.html

Now I just have to figure out whether or not I need sendmail.cw, local-host-names, etc. And if I need a special alias for my user in the aliases file (don't forget to run newaliases to rebuild the database!)

This is a sort of journal-post to myself