Power users may still want to use a mail client like Thunderbird. But most users nowadays seem to prefer reading their emails in the web browser. Let us install a web application for that purpose: Roundcube. Roundcube is the software that was also used in the previous versions of this guide. So if your users […]
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You have already completed the configuration of Dovecot. So fetching emails via IMAP should already work. Let’s give it a try using a simple-looking but powerful IMAP client: mutt. mutt -f imaps://john@example.org@webmail.example.org The connection URL may look a little confusing because of the two “@” characters. Usually mutt expects the format imaps://user@server. And as we
Quotas are size limits for users. You can make sure that users do not waste arbitrary amounts of disk space but are forced to clean up old emails every now and then. The magic happens in two places: Dovecot quota policy service Let’s start with Dovecot. Find the file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-quota.conf and edit it. There are
I hope you haven’t lost your mind yet. If you are unsure how Postfix and Dovecot work together take a moment and go back to the big picture page. In a previous chapter we made sure that Postfix knows which emails it is allowed to receive. Now what to do with the email? It has
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This chapter of our journey leads us to Dovecot – the software that… Before we get to the actual configuration for security reasons I recommend that you create a new system user that will own all virtual mailboxes. The following shell commands will create a system group “vmail” with GID (group ID) 5000 and a system
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In the previous chapter you have created the SQL database schema and inserted some data to play with. Let’s start with the entry point for all email on your system: Postfix. So we need to tell Postfix how to get the information from the database. First let’s tell it how to find out if a certain domain is
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Now it’s time to prepare the MariaDB database that stores the information that controls your mail server. In the process you will have to enter SQL queries – the language of relational database servers. You may enter them in a terminal window using the ‘mysql’ command. But if you are less experienced with SQL you may
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The internet is not a friendly place where you can trust people. If you send data over the internet there is a pretty good chance someone intercepts it. You don’t want that. Our best weapon against that is transport encryption. All you need is to create an encryption key and a certificate for Postfix (SMTP),
After the basic installation your server will reboot and allow you to login. You can either login at the console (if you have physical access to the system) or using SSH (secure shell). Unless you just installed the server it is a good idea to install all missing updates first: apt update apt upgrade Packages
Option 1: Get a server with Debian Bookworm pre-installed If you rent a virtual server at your favorite hosting company it often comes with Debian pre-installed. If you have a chance to change the partitioning then consider the schema shown below. Otherwise feel free to skip this page. Option 2: Get a server with the