Introduction

Webmail is software which allows you to view email from any computer, anywhere in the world, through your web browser. OpenWebMail is a simple, fast and popular webmail package. The website is here. This guide will enable you to setup webmail on your own server, for use either within your home network, or outside.

Preparation

In order to run, you need to first set up a number of things:

• A working Mail Transfer Engine, see MailServer

Installation

OpenWebMail depended on Perl module. If you did not install Perl, install Perl first:

• sudo apt-get install perl

Additional packages that are required after the above is installed, can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager. Search for and install the following if not previously installed:

libauthen-pam-perl (0.16-1.1)
libconvert-asn1-perl (0.22-1)
libmd5-perl (2.03-1)
libnet-ldap-perl (1:0.39-lubuntul)
perl-suid (5.10.0-19ubuntu1.1)
wwwconfig-common (0.2.1)
libpg-perl (1:2.1.1-4)

The OpenWebmail package is dependent on these packages and they must be installed or will result in a broken package.

OpenWebMail is not currently in the Ubuntu repositories. You can get the latest deb package at http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/debian/.

Install it with:

sudo dpkg -i <package_name>

For example, at the time of this writing, the latest version is 2.53-2:

• sudo dpkg -i owm2.53-2.deb

Configuration

OpenWebMail is ready to be used! Every user account on the server has an email account with the same username/password. To add more email users, simply create more users on the system.

make default link for openwebmail

• sudo rm /var/www/openwebmail/index.html
  sudo ln -s /var/www/openwebmail/redirect.html /var/www/openwebmail/index.html

Check it works!

Open a webbrowser, and go to the address http://localhost/openwebmail. Change localhost for the address of your server. You should see the OpenWebMail login box!