Virtualmin, PostFix, and POP/IMAP

I am having trouble using external clients to recieve e-mail from the virtual hosts on my VirtualMin server.

I have postfix and dovecot both set up and running, so I created a new user e-mail account and began testing.

I am able to send, recieve and view e-mails from within Virtualmin’s “Read User E-mail” module. I am able to recieve e-mails from outside sources (like hotmail/yahoo/etc), internal sources (other virtual domains) and able to check these mails via virtualmin.

However, I am unable to use Outlook or Thunderbird to access e-mails via pop3 or IMAP.

I AM able to connect. A password dialog pops up when I tried to connect via Outlook, and when I entered the correct pop up, it would dissapear without errors. However, no e-mail would be downloaded. I know there are ~10-15 e-mails on the server, but I didn’t download any of them.

I then tried to use IMAP for retrieving the e-mails. I still recieved no emails. However, when I went to check it again in Virtualmin, I saw that 4 new IMAP directories had been added. Here is the directory structure in Virtualmin’s Read E-mail module:

/home/mail/virtualuser.mydomain.tld – the inbox that hold the 10 or so e-mails that have been succesfully delivered to this address
/home/mydomain/homes/virtualuser/mail/inbox
/home/mydomain/homes/virtualuser/mail/Junk Email
/home/mydomain/homes/virtualuser/mail/.subscriptions
/home/mydomain/homes/virtualuser/mail/Trash

These last four directories only appeared after I tried to IMAP in using Outlook.

My theory is that I am not able to get messages because when I pop/imap in, the client looks in the for the second folder and my e-mails are actually stored in the first folder above.

How do I fix this situation?

Hey Sam,

I’m not sure what to make of that. Looks like dovecot is looking in the wrong place for mail. This isn’t a Virtualmin Professional install, I presume, but a Virtualmin GPL installation?

You’ve got two choices, I think. Configure postfix to deliver to Maildirs in the users home directory (my preference), or setup Dovecot (or whatever POP/IMAP server you’re using) to use the mbox mail spool you have configured in /home/mail. Either one will work, but I like Maildir better these days (I know the docs on swelltech.com discuss an mbox mail spool in /home/mail, and it’ll work that way, too…the SMTP and POP servers just have to match where they’re dropping and looking for mail, respectively).