Hello everyone

I'm looking to set one of my Linodes up as a mail server, but having a bit of trouble. I know what it is that I want, and have a rough idea of how to do it (thanks to the Arch Wiki) but I can't quite get it right.

Basically, I want to have it set up so that all of my users in a MySQL database, they can connect to their mailbox from a client on their machine using IMAP and SMTP, so they have send/receive functionality but also be able to access their mail through a web interface. I plan on using Roundcube for that last part as it seems to be much nicer than Squirrelmail.

I tried this guide earlier today but found it very hard to follow and ended up with a bunch of things that didn't work. I could add and remove mailboxes with postfixadmin, but any attempt to log in through Roundcube resulted in the message "Unable to connect to IMAP server" and I couldn't connect with any client on my computer, either.

So I think I'm going to start again. I have used this guide before and got it working, but as it states at the top, this only allows for webmail access. It also uses Squirrelmail. Would someone be able/willing to help me go through this process and add the ability for direct IMAP access and the use of Roundcube instead of Squirrelmail?

One of the problems I have is a real trouble following certain documentation, so if someone is able to run through it in simpler steps, I'd really appreciated.

Kind regards,

Joel.

I would suggest you break down your mail setup into discrete tasks/functions, and focus on one at a time.

(1) Incoming mail. Here you'll focus on the postfix and postfix admin setup and aim to get postfix successfully accepting mail from external sources and written to disk in the user's mail directory. Test by sending mail from an outside account (e.g. Gmail), tailing your mail log, and examining directory contents to see where messages are being saved.

(2) POP/IMAP. Next focus on the setup of your POP/IMAP server (Dovecot or Courier-imap), so you can successfully log in with a client (e.g., Thunderbird or Outlook) and "check mail". Focus first on getting the POP/IMAP working on the standard "insecure" ports -- 110 for POP and 143 for IMAP, and once that's done you can investigate what you need to do to enable and use the secure ports.

(3) Outgoing mail. Next focus on adding the ability to send mail from Thunderbird/Outlook via your server. Here you'll add an authentication mechanism, SASL, to your SMTP server.

(4) Webmail. Finally, focus on the webmail setup. Once you've satisfied the http/php requirements of the application, and you've successfully got your POP/IMAP server working (#2 above) then read though the webmail application's config file and adjust as necessary. Typically you'd need to at least set the server host (localhost) and the port (143 for IMAP).

Just take it a step at a time, get one thing working before moving on. It's much less confusing that way

Good luck with it...