Postfix / Desktop Guide Troubles

[MacMasta]

Good afternoon - because I'm new to the forums, I'll start with a little introduction.
I'm a high school senior in Anchorage, Alaska, who has been using Linux for about 10 months. I'm a rabid Debian fanatic, but Gentoo is exhibiting a strong pull.
I'm testing it in vmware to see about installing on a laptop.

Anyway, the install went quite well, and now I'm following the desktop install guide.
Everything goes just fine there, too, until I get to the step to set up postfix.
I've never set up classic unix mail before - my isp gives me pop3, and that combined with evolution makes me quite happy. However, I figure that I'll be building a server here soon, and perhaps figuring out MTAs is a good idea.
The emerges work just fine, by the way.
Anyway, I certainly won't be recieving mail on the gentoo install, so I set it up to just send mail (the desktop guide says that it's configured for this by default).
Anyway, I run "postfix start" as root, (not from the init scripts, but just from the prompt - that's what the guide says...) then su to my user to try it out.
so:
>mutt
it wants a "to", so I plug in my pop3 e-mail address. Then it wants a subject. I plug in "test". I push enter, and it dumps me to "Aborted unmodified message". I push q, and re-run mutt. This time, it doesn't try to start a message, but across the bottom says "/home/user/.maildir is not a mailbox". This confuses me: it asked if I wanted to create that very dir the first time I ran it, and told it yes, and the directory is most certainly there.
What exactly am I missing, here?

Thanks so much!

~Mac~

[grakker]

For what it's worth, I'm coming from debian as well. Before that I ran LinuxPPC for many years. I'm pretty comfortable with Linux. While not a guru by any stretch, I have setup at various times, Sendmail, Exim, and Courier. I tried to follow the Postfix setup step by step, and couldn't get it working. Then tried different hand-tweaks and couldn't get it working, then unmerged it, tried to merge Exim, had errrors in the build, so merged Postfix again. Walked through the steps again. Still can't seem to get email working. When I get home today I'm going to wipe the partition, try it all over again. If I can't get it working, I'm going to boot back into my debian partition, and then maybe try again in a few months...

[Guest]

[Guest]