Sendmail woes

[DunM@]

I'm at work and I've been quested to make a mailserver, I installed sendmail (onto the fresh debian box) and I can't connect to it from another box on the lan. Outlook tells me (when I use the "test account settings" feature) that it has found the SMTP and POP servers, but that it cannot log in or send the message. I have not changed any settings from default (much less know where the conf files are... I'm quite new to this whole linux thing), though as per the instructions here I have run /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q20m . Which, theoretically, started it as a daemon that delivers mail every 20 minutes. Any help would be _greatly_ appreciated.

Update: I loaded thunderbird onto the server and pointed it to localhost as the email servers without success, it said that it couldn't connect.

 

[Fint]

ok, step one: forget outlook (or thunderbird). Start testing with telnet, as that'll eliminate possible Outlook mis-configurations. Telnet to the server, on port 25 (or 110 for POP3) and make sure you get a connection. Then, try to manually send an email, and make sure it works (google for more info on how to do that if you need it).

If the telnet test doesn't work, then either your mail sever software isn't running, or it isn't listening on the ethernet interface.

 

[DunM@]

So I couldn't telnet in, even locally, but on a hunch I tried typing:
mail me@example.com (giving it a real addy of course)
and it gave me:

/etc/mail/submit.cf: line 456: readcf: option RunAsUser: unknown user smmsp
/etc/mail/submit.cf: line 475: readcf: option TrustedUser: unknown user smmsp
can not write to queue directory /var/spool/mqueue-client/ (RunAsGid=0, required=109): Permission denied
Can't send mail: sendmail process failed with error code 70

I've read enough online that I know I don't want to mess around in anything that ends in .cf, so should I manually add that user? If so, what password does it expect to get? Or is that configurable in some file I've not yet discovered?

Edit: The man pages also pointed me to a command newaliases which gave me a similar result:

/etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 499: readcf: option TrustedUser: unknown user smmta

 

[Fint]

Sendmail is not an easy beast to configure. You may be better off with a different MTA, such as exim4.

With that said, Apt should have set up all of the required accounts for you when you installed the package.

 

[DunM@]

I tried Exim4 yesterday, fought with it all day, came up with nothing. Here's what it comes down to, I need IMAP access POP3 access and encryption all over, if you can help me get it I'll use whatever technology you suggest.

 

[DunM@]

I ripping my hair out! Has ANYONE here on this forum EVER configured a mailserver? If so would any amount of begging be enough to convince you to help me? Since my last post I formatted the farking thing and reinstalled debian, with no change, I can't even open port 25!!!!!!! It seems like every time I google for something I find an article that is either uselessly high level or they assume that the user is of normal luck (which I am way below it seems). I found a few of exim4's config files, but none of what I found talked about ports whatsoever. I could rant for hours on how much of a PITA this is, I mean, how much more complicated could email possibly be than webserving (which works out of the box every time in my experiences)? I suppose the real question is, why hasn't the apache foundation made a mailserver yet?

What I'm really looking for is someone to walk me through it as if I was clinically retarded, I'll let you watch via vnc and we can comm over skype, I really need to get this thing going.