Not Receiving Emails

Linode Staff

I have a mail service running on my server but I haven't received any emails. How can I find out what the issue may be?

1 Reply

I would first start to make sure that whatever mail service you are using for your server is running. You can easily check this by checking the services that are currently running on your server. The following two commands will assist with this.

nestat -plantu
ss -plantu

If you don't see your mail service running, you can start this using one of the following commands. Replace "MAIL-SERVICE" with the name of your mail service, which may be Exim, Sendmail, Postfix, etc…

sudo systemctl restart <MAIL-SERVICE>
sudo service <MAIL-SERVICE> restart

I also recommend checking the log files of your mail service for additional insight. The location of the log files will depend on which service you are using and how the service is configured. Some example log files that may exist on your server are referenced below:

/var/log/mail.err
/var/log/mail.log
/var/log/maillog

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