CentOS is the problem I guess. I stay away from windblows because I didn't want Bill Gates telling me this is what I gave you...live with it. I've always wondered if RH users were just closet windows wannabes.

After spending all this time and effort I realized I can't get rid of Postfix and use sendmail as my MTA. It's baffled me why everytime I shut off postfix and kill it's processes, then try to start sendmail, sendmail fails and the postfix processes show up again.

I overlooked in the log that every notation said postfix/sendmail as the process in every instance regarding sendmail. Then checking around found out that RH decided everyone should use sendmail as a client only. That explains why the log check says that sendmail starts okay, the failure comes when trying to start the client side.

How do I get rid of postfix, the omnipresent, so I can live at peace with sendmail??

Hey Dan,

CentOS/RHEL/Fedora have all inherited the alternatives command from Debian. It's a feature, not a bug. ;-)

You need to tell it what MTA you're using:

alternatives --config mta

Select sendmail.sendmail.

Then you'll need to tell chkconfig not to fire up postfix on reboot:

chkconfig --level 345 postfix off
chkconfig --level 345 sendmail on

Then you can do the usual service postfix stop, service sendmail start bit.

Holler if that doesn't straighten things out.

Thanks Joe.

It worked great and I was able to confirm that the email problem isn't just Postfix.

I was going to report the server validation issue but that's taken care of now, I upgraded and that is fine now.

I have a problem with Dovecot and I wonder if that's not throwing the wrench in. When I go to the user and login options I get a major failure whether I make changes or not, on closing I get:

""""Failed to save user and login options : Failed to find section auth default !""""

And apparently Dovecot isn't set to any auth protocol at all right now.


On another note, when I click on VIEW in the system logs i get the following:

""""Failed to save log : '' is not a valid filename : No such file or directory""""

Yet if you click on the log destination link the specs come up and clicking VIEW LOGFILE will bring up the log. Just a minor nuisance but wanted to report it. ;-)

> I have a problem with Dovecot and I wonder if that's not throwing the wrench in. When I go to the user and login options I get a major failure whether I make changes or not, on closing I get:


I also experienced the same problem (from memory, error on line 600-something of the config file relating to userdb). I uninstalled DoveCot (>Add/Remove Software via FC5 GUI), rebooted and reinstalled DoveCot. Everything fine from then on.

This is a good walk-through on how to set up mail server:

Email Server using Postfix, Dovecot, Squirrelmail, Spamassassin, ClamAV and Amavisd
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/printthread.php?t=46540