Hello there. I’m a completely a newbie to this email stuff. Anyway I have installed and configured postfix and mailx on my Centos 6 by following this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-postfix-on-centos-6
However I tried to send an test email by typing ‘mail’ into terminal. but it does not send an email.
Where should I check for error logs? Any help would be appreciated.
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Hi @auzen
Your mail log should be located in /var/log/mail.log unless you’ve changed that configuration in Postfix.
On CentOS, the mail log is /var/log/maillog.
That being said, when it comes to setting up a mail server and actually getting the mail that you send to land in the recipients inbox instead of spam/junk folder, there’s a lot more to the setup.
PTR (Reverse DNS), SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all come in to play and need to be setup as upstream will check during validation – if something is amiss, the e-mail will be rejected or flagged as spam.
Hello there,
It’s possible that port 25 is closed for external uses for new accounts. There are a few ways to go about the problem
- try using ports like 465 or 587 for SMTP
- use a third-party solution only for your E-mails. Good examples are SendGrid.
To expand more on blocking port 25 for new accounts, this is something DigitalOcean has been doing to reduce spam on its network. It is more that we simply cannot accurately determine who is going to send it.
Stopping spam is a constant fight, so DigitalOcean has implemented some restrictions on newer accounts. Having said that, you can always contact them and ask for the port block to be lifted on:
https://www.digitalocean.com/support/
More information here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/support/why-is-smtp-blocked/
Hope that helps!
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