I've been having some trouble setting up POP3 accounts on my Plesk system. I set DNS up so that it points for both incoming and outgoing as mail.domain.com

The recieve works fine, however, when sending it does not work. It just sits there. I have some suspicion that there is something wrong with sendmail. How would I go about on testing this and seeing what could be causing this email problem. Please advise.


Thanks,
Gary

Check your maillog (/var/log/maillog) - qmail (not sendmail in Plesk) will log all attempts to send in the maillog, and if it's not sending, then there will be some indications as to why in the maillog. Based on what that log tells you, you can set about fixing the problem.

I checked out the error logs in qmail and they report this...

Jul 28 04:05:38 plesk qmail: 1027843538.501469 starting delivery 2533: msg 59640
43 to remote wonderswan74@my.vtown.com.au
Jul 28 04:05:38 plesk qmail: 1027843538.501568 status: local 0/10 remote 1/20
Jul 28 04:05:38 plesk qmail: 1027843538.506199 delivery 2533: deferral: Sorry,_I
_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/
Jul 28 04:05:38 plesk qmail: 1027843538.506324 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
Jul 28 04:07:53 plesk qmail: 1027843673.574582 starting delivery 2534: msg 59640
28 to remote wonderswan74@my.vtown.com.au
Jul 28 04:07:53 plesk qmail: 1027843673.574715 status: local 0/10 remote 1/20
Jul 28 04:07:53 plesk qmail: 1027843673.580621 delivery 2534: deferral: Sorry,_I
_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/
Jul 28 04:07:53 plesk qmail: 1027843673.580735 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.215166 new msg 5964024
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.215294 info msg 5964024: bytes 1069 from
qp 27779 uid 2526
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.285783 starting delivery 2535: msg 59640
24 to remote sentofuno@hotmail.com
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.285908 status: local 0/10 remote 1/20
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.334001 new msg 5964033
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.334126 info msg 5964033: bytes 1067 from
qp 27781 uid 2526
Jul 28 04:10:39 plesk qmail: 1027843839.455884 starting delivery 2536: msg 59640
33 to remote 3stripesbrand@bolt.com

Does anyone know what this indicates?

The only thing of interest I see is the error message from the connection attempt to my.vtown.com.au - which is a name that doesn't resolve so there's no way a message can be delivered to that address. Now, vtown.com.au does resolve, but the server doesn't respond to a ping. It's blocking ICMP, but accepts port 25 and 110, so it is a mail server. Best guess? - you're trying to deliver to a bad email address.

As to the other messages, I would expect to see an entry that the other server accepted the message for delivery, but may not be seeing enough of the log file to know whether it was or not.

From these logs though, I would guess that there isn't any problem with the mail server, but there may be one with DNS or the server name and messages it's sending are being rejected.