On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Jud wrote:

...

You have not yet told us if you actually can receive email from outside; both with respect to your MTA configuration and an open (i.e. not firewalled) internet ip.

I will have to investigate my MTA configuration. It's not clear to me what is meant by an "open (not firewalled) internet ip." What can/should I do on my system to create this condition?

Well, you should have an ip that is publicly accessible for mail servers on the internet, especially for the ones you expect will forward email.

If your provider has a firewall for its customers that disallows access to certain ports (such as 25 and 80), you simply can not receive email (by SMTP).

Perhaps FastMail will allow you to specify a specific port, but I doubt it.

IMO, it's not a good idea to run a mailserver on a residential line with a dynamic ip; likely the contract with your isp even forbids this. Ofcourse, it's up to you to decide and try anyway.

...

There is no difference for dovecot. For now, I'd say rather that the problem is either that your MTA doesn't accept email, or that your isp firewalls port 25 (which is rather likely on a dynamic ip home connection).

It is probably true that my isp blocks port 25; it will be easy to determine for sure. If so, are there any solutions you can suggest?

Do you have any accounts on remote servers? Just do a

'telnet your_internet_ip 25'

... or something along those lines.

If not, try an online open relay testing service such as the one ordb provides:

http://www.ordb.org/submit/

Be sure to enable test feedback.

It will probably tell you enough for you to find out if it can reach your server or not.

...

Read the MTA logs. See if there is any connection at all. If there is, check what happens with the messages (refused?). If there is not, you either are not accepting connections on your outside interface, or your provider has blocked access to port 25.

Did you receive any bounces?

Yes, though I deleted them, not even thinking to read them for information. However, it is quite simple for me to create more bounces! ;-)

Do so, and read the actual error message.

This has very little to do with dovecot...