A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
How to Read Email Headers
Jun 19th
Sooner or later, people who run their own server, or email server, are going to run into email issues. In earlier posts, I discussed how to configure an alternate port for Qmail as well as how to test if your email server is working. This post touches on how to read email headers which can be useful when your email delivery is delayed to find out where the delay is occurring.
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How to Configure an Alternate Port for Qmail
Jun 11th
I had initially posted instructions on how to change the default Qmail port. However, an associate of mine pointed out the fallacy in my instructions. Changing the default Qmail port will prevent email from being delivered to your server as foreign mail servers will try to connect to your server on port 25 and if you change it, you won’t be able to receive email. I completely forgot about that little side effect when I posted this and have thus changed this post to only show how to configure an alternate port for Qmail.
A couple days ago I wrote about how to troubleshoot an email server when it isn’t working. This post isn’t necessarily follow-up to that, but more of a corollary. One of the things I didn’t mention in that post is what to do if you are running an email server and your ISP does not allow outgoing connections over port 25, the standard SMTP port. Many ISP’s have this policy to cust down on Spam sent through their servers, mine included. So when I tried to connect to my email the other day through Mozilla Thunderbird, I ran into a problem. I knew what I had to do. I had to configure Qmail to use an alternate port.
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2 SUREFIRE ways to test if your email is working
Jun 8th
We’ve all ran into those problems where all of our sudden, we can’t send email and we don’t know why, and don’t know what to do, besides call our email provider. One thing I’ve been focusing on at work lately is empowering our customers to “take ownership” of their servers, to help them figure things out on their own. The way I put it, being a server administrator is like getting married; “through good times and bad.” The problem is most administrators (or wannabe administrators) only want to be the admin when the server is running. Once there’s a problem, they expect us to be the admin. Sorry folks, but that’s not how it works.
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