Need advice on correct MX records?

And with ZERO real info we're supposed to what, guess?

Why would your email client care what your mx record points too?

MX records are ONLY used by the sending SMTP server.

Hey, I've never done this before. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

What "real" info would I need to post to solicit a well-considered, respectful response?

@inteja:

What "real" info would I need to post to solicit a well-considered, respectful response?
Things that come to mind: the address of your site, the email client you're using, and the error message that your client gives you.

The only domain I have setup on my Linode is bigpicturegames.com

I'm using Thunderbird 12.0.1 on Windows 7

When I try to create an account (either POP3 or IMAP) in Thunderbird I get "Checking password …" then eventually receive the error "Configuration could not be verified - Is the username or password wrong?" (I've checked and they are correct)

When I test Dovecot (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/TestPop3Installation)

If I test Dovecot from my Linode shell I get "+OK Dovecot ready"

But if I test Dovecot from a remote shell I get "telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused"

So, reading the advice on that Dovecot test page "If that didn't work, check all possible firewalls in between, and check that listen setting is * in dovecot.conf. "

I guess that's where I need to look next, unless someone has a better idea …

EDIT: checked doveconf -a and "listen = *, ::" so that looks OK.

I can send email to info at bigpicturegames.com and read it fine using mutt in my Linode shell, but I can't connect via my desktop client.

"Connection refused" usually means that there is no daemon listening on the port in question. You can check using netstat -lvpnut - maybe you needed to restart Dovecot after changing the config?

With regards to MX records… you have no MX records currently…

http://www.intodns.com/bigpicturegames.com

@Dweeber:

With regards to MX records… you have no MX records currently…

http://www.intodns.com/bigpicturegames.com

I'd changed the MX record according to my interpretation of the Linode email guide. I've reverted back to the default MS record setup, but still can't access email from desktop client.

I checked the logs and it looks like dovecot can't connect to the mail user authorisation database. I checked my dovecot-sql.conf and that seems to be OK.

Error in mail.err log:

Jun 21 22:42:07 localhost dovecot: auth-worker: Error: mysql(127.0.0.1): Connect failed to database (mail): Access denied for user 'mail_admin'@'localhost' (using password: YES) - waiting for 25 seconds before retry

Have double and triple checked the password, so not quite sure what's going on.

Thanks to everyone who helped me.

I finally got the mail server working on Ubuntu 12.04 and have documented the changes I had to make to the most recent published guide (Ubuntu 10.04) here: http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9047