Sometimes you may face problems such as e-mails not being sent, delayed delivery or mail bouncing, issues while fetching e-mails, and login failures. In this recipe, we will learn how to identify the exact problem behind these issues. We will learn how to use debugging tools and read the logs of Postfix and Dovecot.
You will need access to a root account or an account with sudo
privileges.
It is assumed that you have already installed Postfix and Dovecot servers.
Follow these steps to troubleshoot the mail server:
Start with checking the status of Postfix and Dovecot. If you get output that says
stop/waiting
ornot running
then the respective service is not running:$ sudo service postfix status $ sudo service dovecot status
Try to restart the respective services. Restarting may give you error messages. Also check for startup logs under
/var/log/mail.log
:$ sudo service postfix restart $ less /var/log/mail.log
You can use a
tail
command...