Setting Up Email with Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL

I had recently set up a Linode (which is awesome by the way) to handle the incoming and outgoing mail of a domain of mine. Linode actually has very good instructions on the subject, which can be found here.

After following these instructions to the letter and configuring my Android mail client to theoretically send and receive mail at my domain, I was having no luck.

What was helpful in tracking down the problem was:

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

When I would send or receive mail, the email wouldn’t bounce, but instead I would see an error:

postmaster_address setting not given

Linode’s documentation did not mention this anywhere, but after many Google searches later, what I had to edit was:

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-lda.conf

In this config, I just had to add:

postmaster_address = your.email@somedomain.com

And restart Dovecot.

sudo service dovecot restart

Now I could start deleting the flood of test emails I had sent to myself trying to figure out the problem. Hopefully this saves somebody else a bit of time.