[SOLVED] Installation complete on Ubuntu, problems receiving mail...

[jreinhart]

Hi there! Thanks in advance for your help.

I'd like to begin by saying that Zimbra is, so far and by far the best mail solution I've ever worked with.

I'm currently testing Zimbra on numerous platforms and am planning on distributing it to a few of my clients (I assist small businesses with their IT solutions). So far I've installed it on a Mac and on Ubuntu. The point of the servers is to provide internal mail, so each user will have an internal address (such as bob@company.local) and their external that they'll pull down into their Zimbra inbox (such as bob@gmail.com). There's no need for external mail to resolve to the internal server, since each client will pull mail from their external address - the clients prefer it that way.

Here's my problem: when I installed Zimbra on the Ubuntu system, I could not receive mail from another internal user. For example, if I sent a message from jesse@company.local to john@company.local, the message would appear to be delivered but would never actually reach John's inbox. I've checked the message store and there are no messages pending or otherwise. I also cannot IM, set up appointments, etc...anything from one user to another fails! I'm guessing this is DNS, but...

When I installed on the Mac, everything works just fine with no additional configuration needed. No DNS needed. Mail from jesse@company.local to john@company.local works fine! IM works fine...appointments work...

Maybe it's my ignorance of how Mac resolves names, but I haven't been able to come up with a reason or solution. I'm about to install Bind9 on my Ubuntu box but would prefer the simplicity that the Mac box provides with the low cost of the Ubuntu box, you know?

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for any help you can give me.

- Jesse

[phoenix]

You do need a DNS server in your LAN that resolves the IP of your zimbra server, it's required for correct mail delivery. You can also check the log files to see the fate of messages that arrive in the system and don't appear to be delivered. The Mail Queues tab in the Admin UI will alo provide some initial information on whether there's any mail in the deferred queue.

[jreinhart]

Thanks for the reply.

My confusion was that when I installed it on the Mac, everything worked and was delivered fine. However, when I installed it on the Ubuntu server, nothing did.

I'm currently slogging through installing and figuring out Bind9...I'm a relatively new Linux user (3 months ago) from being a Windows guy all my life. I won't ask you for tips on installing Bind because it's not your job, but do you know if there's any problems running the DNS server on the same system as Zimbra?

Also, do you know why it worked on the Mac (with no DNS) and not on Ubuntu? Just to satisfy my curiousity if you know off the top of your head.

It'd be nice if the server didn't need to resolve an MX record to deliver mail to itself. The mail isn't going anywhere anyways.

Thanks!
- Jesse

[phoenix]

I'm afraid I know almost nothing about the MAC, I can only assume already has a DNS server.installed. You can check that by doing a "dig zimbra.com" and the output should (near the end of the output) have the IP of the DNS server it used to resolve the query.

You might find the tutorial on the set-up for Ubuntu 6.06 helpful as it has the configuration for BIND on there. There's no problem running BIND on the Zimbra server and the split DNS examples in our wiki do just that.

I'm afraid the DNS requirement is the same for any MTA and mail delivery, Postfix is what we use for the MTA and it also has that requirement.

If you have any problems with the DNS just post again.

[jreinhart]

I'm still working on getting a functional Bind installation so I don't have any news on the Ubuntu Zimbra installation.

I ran the dig on the Mac, and it returned a public DNS server. I think there's something different in the Mac build or perhaps in the Mac itself that doesn't try to route traffic that goes to itself...

Just thinking out loud. None of this is really anything I'm an expert at, and I'm learning as I go.

Still think Zimbra is the best mail solution out there by far.

- Jesse

[Barahon]

dot local was supposed to have been a multicast top-level domain before Microsoft began using it as a unicast top-level domain for internal networks. Using dot local is your top-level unicast domain propagates their break with custom and causes interoperability issues with some versions of Linux, and, I thought, with MacOS X. There are lots of alternatives: dot almost-anything works: .internal, .int, .lan, or .localnet. Or, you can create a "local" child domain of your dot com name-space: something like local.mycompany.com.

Try that and see if your problems go away.

[jreinhart]

Cool, thanks for the info.

I got it working after installing and configuring BIND, so for some reason OSx doesn't require DNS for local mail delivery, whereas Linux does.

Going forward I'll avoid the use of .local though.

- Jesse

[jreinhart]

Just marked this solved to wrap it up.

On a related note, I've found that some mail hosts (specifically the mail at web.com) do domain lookups, so if you try to send mail from a domain that can't be checked via an nslookup on the internet (such as domain.local) those mail servers will reject the mail.

On the domain.local server, I could send to gmail, yahoo, etc, but when I sent to other mail services it would sometimes get rejected depending on whether or not the mail host ran a domain lookup.

Best way I've gotten "internal mail" working is to set up a server for domain.com that matches the POP server on the internet for domain.com, then have each user set up their Zimbra account to pull down the mail from the pop3 server. So far this has been flawless.

- Jesse