Introduction

A very simple guide to build a free mail server using Ubuntu, Courier MTA and SpamAssassin. After following the instructions below you will have a functional mail server in about as much time as it will take you to read this guide to the end.

  • Installing and configuring the server OS
  • Adding Courier MTA and SpamAssassin packages

  • Setting up Maildir folders for all users
  • Configuring SpamAssassin and maildrop

  • Setting up Courier, Sqwebmail and Apache
  • Backup to tape
  • Administration of the mail server
  • Using graphical desktop Xfce

First things first. You will need a static (public) IP address, a DNS registered name (aka mail.example.org) with an MX record for @example.org domain pointing to it, and a valid SSL certificate (self-signed certificate by your own authority or from an outside authority). For hardware, a relatively inexpensive server with hardware RAID, and a tape drive for backups, would work well. The storage size is mainly determined by the number of users and mail quotas you plan to setup.

Installation

You should use server version of Ubuntu with LTS (Long Term Support), as it comes with free security updates for 5 years. You can get appropriate CD from the download section of Ubuntu website. The only options that require thinking during install are hostname (mail in our case) and the first user name (who will become the administrator of this system). It is a good idea to keep it simple and name your users by firstlastinitialnumber, e.g. my user name would be aa1. Later you can assign an alias to a user name to get an email address you want (firstname.lastname@example.org). On the software selection screen we only need the OpenSSH server for remote administration.

After reboot following the initial setup, we will install the Courier mail server components and the SpamAssassin package. You can use ssh at this point to login to the server from another computer (your workstation for example). If you plan to create any other users, you should limit who is allowed to do that by editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config configuration file and adding "AllowGroups admin" at the end (restart the ssh server to apply changes). Now only server administrators can login using ssh.

After you get the server shell prompt one way or another, run following commands on the shell to install Courier and SpamAssassin:

sudo apt-get install courier-mta courier-mta-ssl courier-imap courier-imap-ssl courier-doc sqwebmail
sudo apt-get install spamassassin spamc

Configuration

With the software packages in place, we need to configure everything to work together as a mail server. First, we will set up the Maildir skeleton folder (with a sub folder for Spam) for all users. To do that, run following commands in the home directory of your admin account:

maildirmake Maildir
maildirmake -f Spam Maildir
maildirmake -q 10000000S ./Maildir
touch .courier
sudo cp -r Maildir /etc/skel
sudo cp .courier /etc/skel

This will set the default email user quota to 10000000 Bytes (you can adjust it later per user). This also creates a Spam folder for every user, so that courier server can place email messages identified by SpamAssassin as Spam into separate folder instead of your Inbox.

Next we will make changes to SpamAssassin and maildrop configuration files to filter incoming email messages. First, enable the SpamAssassin daemon in /etc/default/spamassassin. Also you should enable nightly rule updates by setting "cron=1" at the bottom of that file. If you wish, adjust settings in /etc/spamassassin/local.cf so that Spam email messages get delivered into Spam folder unchanged ("report_safe 0"), and set the trusted networks to "trusted_networks 10/8 192.168/16" (or to whatever your internal network is). (Re)start the SpamAssassin daemon and configure maildrop to use SpamAssassin for filtering:

sudo vi /etc/courier/maildroprc 

Paste in the following lines:

import HOME
import USER
DEFAULT="$HOME/Maildir/"

if ($SIZE < 256000)
{
   xfilter "/usr/bin/spamc -u $USER"
}
if ( /^X-Spam-Status: Yes/ )
{
  to "$DEFAULT/.Spam/"
}

Maildrop will call spamc for every message smaller than 256000 Bytes (most Spam messages are smaller than that) and deliver Spam messages into the folder called Spam. Also, we need to configure Courier to use maildrop for local delivery. In the /etc/courier/courierd configuration file, uncomment the line:

DEFAULTDELIVERY="| /usr/bin/maildrop"

# and comment out the line with .\Maildir.

We need to specify our email domain by adding "example.org" line to /etc/courier/locals so that Courier MTA knows what emails to treat as local.

Because we would like our users to relay outgoing emails through this server as well, we need to enable authenticated SMTP relaying by setting the ESMTPAUTH parameter in /etc/courier/esmtpd to ESMTPAUTH="LOGIN PLAIN". Also edit /etc/courier/esmtpd-ssl and set AUTH_REQUIRED to 1 to force all clients to authenticate when they are using STMP over SSL. To use SSL encryption, you can either purchase an SSL certificate from an outside certification authority or use a self-signed certificate. The only downside of using a self-signed certificate is that no email client will trust it by default without first installing your root CA certificate (that you used to sign your SSL certificate). That would work if you plan to use this mail server for a small number of users and you can force them to install your root CA certificate.

To use your SSL certificate (and SSL key!) in Courier MTA run these commands:

sudo cat mail.example.org.key mail.example.org.crt > /etc/courier/imapd.pem
sudo cat mail.example.org.key mail.example.org.crt > /etc/courier/esmtpd.pem

Restart both courier-imapd-ssl and courier-mta-ssl daemons. At this point you can use any standard mail client to read and send email over IMAP and SMTP protocols (also using SSL/TLS encryption). To provide a web-based interface to this mail server (and a way for your users to change passwords, set up auto-reply and forwarding settings), we will use Sqwebmail. You can customize this interface with your logo:

sudo cp yourlogo.png /var/www/sqwebmail
sudo vi /usr/lib/courier/sqwebmail/html/en-us/loginform.inc.html

# and change logo.png to yourlogo.png with correct size.

Also you need to tell Sqwebmail your default domain name "example.org" in /etc/courier/defaultdomain for outgoing messages.

To enable auto-reply and forwarding capabilities for mail users you need to create a file maildirfilterconfig:

sudo vi /etc/courier/maildirfilterconfig

# and add these lines:

MAILDIRFILTER=../.mailfilter
MAILDIR=./Maildir

This tells Sqwebmail to save each user's maildrop filters in a file called .mailfilter in his/hers home directory. Now you can setup email forwarding and auto-replies using Sqwebmail. You first create an auto-reply message, and then enable this auto-reply message in the filter rules page.

To access Sqwebmail securely, we need to tell apache2 daemon to listen on the SSL port and to use our valid SSL certificate:

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-ssl
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo cp /etc/courier/imapd.pem /etc/apache2/apache.pem

# Edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl and change the 4 lines at the top to look like this:

NameVirtualHost *:443
<VirtualHost *:443>
  SSLEngine On
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/apache.pem
...
</VirtualHost>

# Restart apache daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If everything worked well, you should get the Sqwebmail interface at http(s)://mail.example.org/cgi-bin/sqwebmail using a web browser.

Administration

We need to schedule two cron jobs to delete old Spam messages (older than 30 days) in user mail folders and to clear webmail login cache files. The most straightforward way to do that, is to add the following lines to the end of the /etc/crontab file:

# Delete Spam at 7am daily if older than 30 days
0 7     * * *   root    find /home/*/Maildir/.Spam/cur -type f -mtime +30 -print0 | xargs -0 rm
# clear webmail login cache records
20 *    * * *   root    perl /usr/lib/courier/sqwebmail/cleancache.pl

Before you start creating users and giving out email addresses, you should make sure you can backup your server to a tape. You can simply label one tape for each day of the week and use this simple script to backup you server manually:

 #!/bin/bash
 mt -f /dev/st0 rewind
 sudo tar -cvf /dev/st0 --one-file-system --exclude=/cdrom --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/proc /
 mt -f /dev/st0 offline

Once the backup tape is ready, you should store it in a remote location (separate from the building your mail server is in) and rotate your backup tapes daily. Other useful tape drive commands are:

# Rewind
mt -f /dev/st0 rewind
# List tape contents
tar -tf /dev/st0
# Restore tape into current directory:
tar -xvf /dev/st0
# Restore /bin directory only
tar -xvf /dev/st0 /bin
# Unload tape from the drive
mt -f /dev/st0 offline

You should also set up a maintenance schedule and inform your users when to expect service interruptions. If you are ready to install updates and restart your system, run this commands:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Last but not least comes email user administration. You can add/remove users with these commands:

sudo adduser username --home /home/username --gecos "Full Name"
sudo passwd username
sudo deluser --remove-home username

If you would like to give a user admin privileges (to help you with system maintenance), add this user to the admin group:

sudo useradd USERNAME admin

When needed, you can adjust a user's email quota by running this command:

sudo maildirmake -q 100000000S /home/$USER/Maildir

This sets quota to 100MB for user $USER. To remove this user's quota entirely, delete the /home/$USER/Maildir/maildirsize file.

Courier MTA server wide message size limit defaults to 10MB. You can change it to 20MB by simply creating a file /etc/courier/sizelimit with number 20000000 in it.

You should define the recipient(s) for postmaster/root emails under aliases directory:

sudo vi /etc/courier/aliases/system
# Change the line with postmaster: to forward this mail to you
postmaster: yourusername

# Run this command to make this alias "active":
sudo makealiases

Similarly you can assign aliases to all users. Create a new file called users and make your alias assignments there:

sudo vi /etc/courier/aliases/users
# add aliases one per line:
alex.andr: aa1
# where alex.andr is an alias for the real user aa1

# Run this command to make this alias "active":
sudo makealiases

You could even create very basic email distribution lists this way. Simply create a file mlists and define your lists there:

sudo vi /etc/courier/aliases/mlists
# add members separated by comas:
testlist: aa1, postmaster

# Run this command to make this list "active":
sudo makealiases

For any serious mailing list setup, you should look into using couriermlm - Courier mailing list manager, or even better, into separate package called Mailman.

If you ever need to forward all emails for someone to a different address you can use .courier file in this user's home directory. Add a comma-separated list of email addresses in $HOME/.courier file to forward the messages. Also you can disable/bypass all maildrop (Sqwebmail and SpamAssassin!) filtering by putting single "./Maildir/" line into user's .courier file.

Using graphical desktop Xfce

For some admins (especially beginners) it might be easier to use graphical tools for system administration instead of the Linux shell. In this case you can install the lightweight Xfce desktop environment on your ubuntu mail server.

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Xfce graphical environment provides multiple tools for system administration, such as "Users and Groups" for user administration, "Update Manager" for software updates, and a number of other programs. You can create desktop launcher shortcuts to run following bash scripts so you can easily update aliases with makealiases command, or set email quota for users, or start Thunar file manager as root (make sure it displays the hidden files as well!) without ever using Linux shell. If you edit alias files using graphical text editors, remember to delete the backup files with "~" at the end (graphical text editors often create them) - otherwise you will end up with duplicate email deliveries!

Here are some example scripts. To start Thunar as root, create a launcher for the following script:

 #!/bin/bash
 sudo thunar

A simple script to set email quota for a user:

 #!/bin/bash
 echo "User name?"
 read username
 echo "Quota size?"
 read size
 sudo maildirmake -q "$size"S /home/"$username"/Maildir

A script to delete backup files created by graphical text editors and to update the mail aliases:

 #!/bin/bash
 sudo find /etc/courier/aliases -name '*~' -exec rm -rf "{}" \;
 sudo makealiases

Thank you for reading this far! These instructions provide a starting point for setting up and running a mail server. It is a fact that to keep this guide short a lot of useful information was omitted, but it could serve you as an example of a functional mail server setup in under an hour.


CategoryEmail

MailServerCourierSpamAssassin (last edited 2009-04-08 23:32:00 by user-0c933ij)