IN PROGRESS: Ultimate Email System How-To Jacob Barde The How-To entails the instructions and procedures to setup the ultimate email system. It makes uses of the following technologies: Maildir/ formatted mailboxes, IMAP, SSL, Apache (+mod_ssl, +mod_php), SquirrelMail and/or Horde.org's IMP Mail, Cyrus-SASL, FetchMail, PostFix and Bayesian spam filters. 1.0 07 Feb 2003 Pre-requisites
Packages Needed This document is NOT FINISHED, and has not been tested. The author takes no responsibility if you hose your system.

You will need the following packages:

  • Apache (+mod_ssl & mod_php) - Web server including SSL (secure connections) and PHP
  • Courier-Imap - very nice IMAP server
  • SquirrelMail - a web-interfaced email client (you can use this, or your favorite web-interfaced email client, e.g. horde.org's IMP Mail)
  • PostFix (?) - an Mail Transport agent, not sure if needed with Courier-IMAP
  • Evolution (or preferred email client) - a desktop email client
  • procmail (?, spambayes delivery) - delivers email on the local system (Spambeyes can use it)
  • FetchMail - a nice program to go out and get all your email to store it on your local machine, very nice for consolidating your email
  • Spambayes - a Bayesian SPAM filter
  • mb2md (mbox2Maildir) script - a script to move mbox formatted email to the Maildir format which is easier to back up in an efficient manner.
  • eudora2mbox script - a script to migrate eudora email (similar-to-mbox format) to Unix mbox format

On Gentoo systems: 

find a nice area to download and compile things
# cd /usr/local/src
# mkdir ultimate_emailsys
# cd ultimate_emailsys
# emerge sync
# emerge -u courier-imap squirrelmail postfix evolution procmail fetchmail apache php mod_php mod_ssl
# wget http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/download/spambayes-nightly.tar.gz
# lynx http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

Setting up the server side of things
Configuring Courier-IMAP This document is NOT FINISHED, and has not been tested. The author takes no responsibility if you hose your system. This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on Courier-IMAP. See there for updates. When I initially tried this, Courier-IMAP was being difficult with authenticating non-root users.

Anyway...

Configuring Apache This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on Apache. See there for updates.
Configuring SSL This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on ____. See there for updates.
Configuring mod_php This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on ____. See there for updates.
PostFix This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on ____. See there for updates.
procmail
fetchmail
SquirrelMail This follows the same guide as Gentoo's Desktop Configuration Guide section on ____. See there for updates.
Spambayes
Backing up your email
Before backing up This document is NOT FINISHED, and has not been tested. The author takes no responsibility if you hose your system. Do not restart any of these services until you have completed this entire How-To Stop fetchmail if you have it running, stop your MTA (sendmail, PostFix, qmail, etc.) any email client (Evolution, Outlook, Eudora, etc) Backup your email files on your server. make sure to check /var/spool/mail/[your username], ~/.mail, ~/Mail/, etc.