Email Notifications Not Working....

This is my third time posting for this exact issue....So I am hoping I can get lucky by carefully helping you to get me the right answer...lol.....Normally this topic falls through the cracks by 10 posts.

Before I explain my issue, let me start by explaining my setup. I host everything myself.

1. I have my own mail server on my network. Its a program called Mail Enable which runs on Windows Server 2003.

2. In a separate box, I have Dolphin 6.1.6 installed on linux (OpenSuSE 11.1) and using MySQL 5.0 and Apache2

3. When I installed Dolphin, i configured it with an email address that resides on my own mail server.

That being said, I made the following configuration changes in dolphin:

1. In "Settings -> Moderation Settings" I unchecked the boxes for "Automatic profile activation after joining" and "Automatic profile confirmation without Confirmation Email". That way the system will allow me to verify email addresses rather than blindly accepting them.

After a test profile gets registered, it states:

Join complete
Mail has been successfully sent.
You will receive it within a minute.

The Problem:

No mail ever gets delivered. Whenever I registered a test profile, I always used either a gmail or hotmail address. I've double checked the spam/junk folders just in case......So I am 1000% sure that nothing ever gets delivered.

Now from what I understand from my previous posts, dolphin uses a php mail function to send email. And PHP forwards the request to whatever email program it's configured with.

In my case, I have sendmail installed on the same server as Dolphin. I used the GUI interface for sendmail in KDE (called Mail Transfer Agent) to configure sendmail with my mail server's IP address and login information.

I also told my mail server to accept connections from my linux server (the server with Dolphin installed).

I am really lost with this issue. I checked my mail server's logs to see if I can find anything, and it appears that my linux server isn't even establishing any sort of connection to it. I have a strong feeling the issue lies with the way I am using sendmail.

In my php.ini file, I've tried the following entries separately:

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

and

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

and

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

sendmail_from = my@emailadress.com

Please help before my head explodes :'(

Let me also add, I know for a fact that my mail server is able to deliver to gmail and hotmail because I send emails to there all the time through my mail server. This mail server has been up for many years.

I'm thinking maybe I don't have sendmail configured correctly (which is weird since the GUI setup was REALLY simple). Maybe I need a sample sendmail config file to cheat with?

Have you checked to see if your domain or IP is on the Blackhaus spam list?  If it is, then Yahoo/GMail/MSN and so on will NOT recognize it no matter what you do, which means it won't even come up as spam.  You literally will get blacklisted for it and they will throw it ALL away.

This doesn't mean that you have done anything wrong, usually it means someone who had your IP at one time did something and you inadvertently got stuck with the IP that used to be theirs.  Look at it like this, someone doesn't pay their bills and has bill collectors from 90 creditors and 250 countries calling like crazy, so they follow their personal pattern and don't pay the phone bill.  Eventually, it gets shut off, then a little later re-issued out to you.   Suddenly your getting bill collector calls like crazy for someone you don't know, beyond inadvertently getting their number. 

I strongly suggest you check the IP on the Blackhaus and other anti-spam lists and if it is, then you'll need to get with the IP provider to verify you were not the one creating the issue and then get it removed.  I accidentally got one once and it took 2 days and then it was solved.  Keep in mind, I had a host that was able to help with it.

I understand what you mean. But remember this part of my post:

"Let me also add, I know for a fact that my mail server is able to deliver to gmail and hotmail because I send emails to there all the time through my mail server. This mail server has been up for many years."

and

" I checked my mail server's logs to see if I can find anything, and it appears that my linux server isn't even establishing any sort of connection to it. "

But I checked anyway to see if it's been blacklisted....and it checks out OK with 100 known blacklists.

For the blacklist check I used http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx and http://www.blacklistcheck.com