Kite is a webmail designed to look a lot like gmail and to be easily deployable on a single server. It's written in Javascript with Angularjs for the frontend, and in Python 2 for the backend.

This is very much alpha software, but I hope to have something usable in a couple months.

You can see a demo here (this is my staging server, be easy on it).

VPS Setup

If you're feeling adventurous, here's how to set it up at a VPS provider like DigitalOcean.

You'll need a machine (real or virtual) with Ubuntu 12.04LTS. Debian should probably work, but I haven't tested it yet.

DNS Setup

This is the trickiest part of the setup because you'll have to modify your domain's DNS configuration on your registrar's website. Unfortunately, DNS is complicated and all registrars have different and sometimes very confusing interfaces.

These instructions are pretty high-level, so don't hesitate to contact me if you need additional guidance.

Let's say you own the domain "example.com", a server at IP address 192.168.50.4 , and you'd like to deploy a kite instance on it.

You'll need to add to your DNS config:

one A record to point to your server's IP address.

one MX record to specify the mail server for your domain.

In the case of our example.com domain, this is what the config should look like:

Record name Record value Record type Time to Live mail 192.168.50.4 A 1H @ mail.example.com. (This is not a typo. The value ends with a '.') MX 1H

The actual install

The rest of the install is pretty easy.

Get the latest sources

git clone http://github.com/khamidou/kite # Get the latest sources

Install Fabric (assuming you are using a debian based distro).

sudo apt-get install fabric

Run the setup (the setup is run as root, but any user who is a sudoer can be used instead)





cd kite fab setup -u root -H mail.example.com -p root_password

After this, navigate to mail.example.com to login to Kite.

Running the development version

To run it, you'll need to have vagrant installed. When it's done, run:

vagrant up

After this, browse to http://192.168.50.4 . You should be greeted by a login window. Use whatever username/password combination to login.

The host name of the vagrant box is kitebox.dev. You should probably add it to your (host) machine /etc/hosts.

Contact/Help

I can be reached at [email protected]. It try to do my best to reply to all incoming email, but sometimes it may slip through.