I’ve tried everything including a fresh install and I still can’t get outgoing mail to work. I can receive but not send. I chatted with Gemini literally all day so I feel like we’ve covered lots of bases I can’t begin to explain because i’m literally just copying and obeying it lol … that’s why i ended up doing the fresh install (I just got started with virtualmin a few days ago so i’m not losing much … trying to get all the way to a stable initial setup before i really move a ton of sites over. so yeah, when you check postfix states it says running but exited and we could never figure out what was up because it says it’s listening … any suggestions, i do see other people have had this before but i don’t know how to tell how similar our cases are. also my eyes are crossing and i need to eat before i collapse. i’m leaving this note in desperation and then heading out to be away from my desk for a couple hours.
Ok I found that screen and it says my PostFix is running so that’s good!! I don’t think it’s about my hosting provider because I was able to both send and receive a couple days ago before a different reinstall that I did trying to fix a different problem. I’m using a VPS through Contabo, I’ll check their documentation though to see if they mention it.
You must look at the log. No one can possibly guess without information about why it’s not working.
This covers how to look at the mail-related logs:
On Ubuntu 24.04, you’d be looking at the journal for the postfix unit. (If Postfix is configured to run in a chroot, I believe there would be a postfix@- unit or something similarly ridiculous.)
That said, usually it’s just that you’re assuming you have port 25, but your provider does not let you use port 25. Without port 25, you cannot send email and you don’t have a mail server. You’ll need to use a relay, instead of delivering directly. The log will probably confirm this for you, if it’s the case.
Thanks for the suggestions and guidance everyone!! I made some progress after I remembered that when this was working the other day it was after I had been clicking around and installed roundcube, so I guessed that maybe it did something to the smtp settings that helped, so I tried that again and it did work, but overall the experience has shown me that I don’t want to be guessing like this and chasing solutions that are hard to find when it comes to my hosting environment. I’m super committed to open source software but I need to know when I’m in over my head and this was one of those times! I’m a web designer not a network protocol expert. Thanks again y’all, I appreciate the quick and helpful responses. Thank you for fighting for digital freedom!!
There is no harm in getting a spare pc, installing virtualmin and have a mess about. When in doubt I make changes and test commands on my test virtualmin machine before doing it on my live one.
