Preparing the database

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 prefer using a web interface. That’s what you installed Adminer for.

Setting up Adminer

Basically Adminer is just a couple of PHP files served from your Apache web server. The setup is simple. Edit your /etc/apache2/sites-available/webmail.example.org-https.conf file and put this line anywhere between the <VirtualHost> and the </VirtualHost> tags:

Alias /adminer /usr/share/adminer/adminer

Reload the Apache process:

systemctl reload apache2

Open your web browser and point it to “https://webmail.example.org/adminer”. It will show the login form. Good.

You will not be able to login yet. The only available database user is ‘root’, but it is only usable from the shell – not over a network.

Generate two random passwords

In this section you will create the basic database “mailserver” and two users. One user (“mailadmin”) will be able to change the data in the database and is meant for you. The other user (“mailserver”) can only read from the database and is meant for the server processes.

Use the pwgen tool to create two random passwords for these users:

pwgen -s1 30 2

Take a note of the passwords or store them somewhere safe.

Create the ‘mailserver’ database

This step is simple. Connect to the database using the ‘mysql’ command:

mysql

You should see the MariaDB prompt that allows you to enter further SQL commands:

MariaDB [(none)]>

Now you are expected to speak SQL. To create a database enter:

CREATE DATABASE mailserver;

You will be told that your query was OK and that one new row was added.

Create the database users

Now you have an empty database. Let us give the “mailadmin” database user the required privileges to manage it.

You are still connected to the database, right? To create a user with full permissions enter this SQL command. Please use the first password you just generated instead of mine:

grant all on mailserver.* to 'mailadmin'@'localhost' identified by 'gefk6lA2brMOeb8eR5WYaMEdKDQfnF';

Also create the read-only user that will grant Postfix and Dovecot database access later (use your second random password here).

grant select on mailserver.* to 'mailserver'@'127.0.0.1' identified by 'x893dNj4stkHy1MKQq0USWBaX4ZZdq';

Wait a minute. Why is there “127.0.0.1” instead of “localhost” in the second SQL command? Is that a typo? No, it’s not. Well, in network terminology those two are identical. But MariaDB (and Oracle’s MySQL) distinguishes between the two. If you initiate a database connection to “localhost” then you talk to the socket file which lives at /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock on your server. But if you connect to “127.0.0.1” it will create a network connection talking to the TCP socket on port 3306 on your server. The difference is that any process on your server can talk to 127.0.0.1. But the socket file has certain user/group/other permissions just like any other file on your file system. Postfix will be restricted to its /var/spool/postfix directory and cannot by default access that socket file. So by using 127.0.0.1 we circumvent that limitation.

When you use Adminer you will have to use ‘localhost’ as a database server when using the ‘mailadmin’ user but ‘127.0.0.1’ when using the ‘mailserver’ user.

Now you can use Adminer to log in using the mailadmin account and the first password:

You should get logged in and see the “mailserver” database:

Creating the database tables

Do you remember that I introduced three Postfix mappings earlier? One for virtual domains, one for virtual aliases and another for virtual users? Each of the mappings needs a database table that you will create now. Feel free to use Adminer. I will however also show the SQL statement to create the tables that you can enter on the ‘mysql’ command-line tool. Below you can click on either [Adminer] or [SQL] to choose.

The first table to create is…

virtual_domains

This table just holds the list of domains that you will use as virtual_mailbox_domains in Postfix.

USE mailserver;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `virtual_domains` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
 ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

virtual_users

The next table contains information about your users. Each mail account takes up one row.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `virtual_users` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `domain_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
 `email` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
 `password` varchar(150) NOT NULL,
 `quota` bigint(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
 UNIQUE KEY `email` (`email`),
 FOREIGN KEY (domain_id) REFERENCES virtual_domains(id) ON DELETE CASCADE
 ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

virtual_aliases

The last table contains forwardings from an email address to other email addresses.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `virtual_aliases` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `domain_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
 `source` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
 `destination` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
 FOREIGN KEY (domain_id) REFERENCES virtual_domains(id) ON DELETE CASCADE
 ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

As described in the section about domain types there can be multiple targets for one source email address. You just would need to insert several rows with the same source address and different destination addresses that will get copies of an email. Postfix will consider all matching rows.

Example data to play with

Too much theory so far? I can imagine. Let’s populate the database with an example.org domain, a john@example.org email account and a forwarding of jack@example.org to john@example.org. We will use that information in the next chapter to play with.

To add that sample data just run these SQL queries:

REPLACE INTO mailserver.virtual_domains (id,name) VALUES ('1','example.org');

REPLACE INTO mailserver.virtual_users (id,domain_id,password,email)
 VALUES ('1', '1', '{BLF-CRYPT}$2y$05$.WedBCNZiwxY1CG3aleIleu6lYjup2CIg0BP4M4YCZsO204Czz07W', 'john@example.org');

REPLACE INTO mailserver.virtual_aliases (id,domain_id,source,destination)
 VALUES ('1', '1', 'jack@example.org', 'john@example.org');

Do you wonder how I got the long cryptic password? I ran “doveadm pw -s BLF-CRYPT” to create a secure hash of the simple password “summersun”. Once you have installed Dovecot you can try that yourself but you will get a different output. The reason is that the passwords are salted to increase their security.

Remember to remove that sample data before you go live with your mail server. Thanks to the delete cascade you just need to remove the virtual_domain. The alias and the mailbox will be deleted automatically. This would be the SQL query you should run before taking your mail server into production:

DELETE FROM mailserver.virtual_domains WHERE name='example.org';