My new Virtualmin site seems to be ready, however, its email functionality has not yet been tested. Testing the outgoing part is easy, but I do not know how to test incoming. The ‘answer’ is not as simple as ‘Send yourself an email’ since I have not yet switched the DNS records and it seems that one cannot send an email to user@ip_address.
Since this is my first Virtualmin site before, I am nervous about switching the DNS records until I know that email works properly. Can you please suggest how I might do this?
Well, you can send root an email using root@ip_address – and whatever account is configured to get root’s email would then receive that message. That would verify that email gets in from the outside.
Also, if you log into your server over SSH, you can send yourself an email using the command line.
If you have the “mail” command installed, you could do something like this:
cat /etc/issue | mail -s test user@domain.tld
If your server is setup to accept email for domain.tld, that should be delivered locally. You can view the email logs, and procmail logs, to see what happens with that email.
You could also setup a sub-domain like sub.domain.tld on your server, possibly making it an alias of an existing domain on there – and then go into the current DNS records you have setup, and set the ‘A’ and ‘MX’ records for that sub-domain to point to your new server.
Then, you could send a test email to user@sub.domain.tld.
Regarding your first comment - are your sure? Based on my reading, one cannot send an email to user@ip_address. If my understanding is wrong, could you please point me to a resource which explains this.
I like your idea about the subdomain. I am working to test this approach.