Easy Method To Set Up A Personal Mailbox

In our previous articles we have installed LAMP stack at our server, configured FTP and DNS records for our site. Now you probably want to know how to easy setup admin mailbox on Linux for your website. It's pretty standard, and a mailbox that looks professional is always welcome. Mail server software actually contains an SMTP server (exim) which receives and sends mail to remote servers, and POP/IMAP server (dovecot) which allow users access their remote Linux mail server and retrieve stored mail from their mailboxes. You can also, technically, host your domain at Google and use Gmail with your domain mailboxes but it’s not free, and there are restrictions that come with that.

Installing exim

We'll run the following commands to install the latest EPEL repository and exim package, as well as disable postfix:

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # yum install exim –y # service postfix stop # chkconfig postfix off

Now we will run these commands to change the default MTA to exim,

select exim in a menu, add a line to exim config file, and launch it:

# alternatives --config mta # chkconfig exim on # echo “primary_hostname = mail.iloveserversuit.com” >> /etc/exim/exim.conf

Edit ‘/etc/exim/exim.conf’ transport section like this:

local_delivery: driver = appendfile directory = $home/Maildir maildir_format maildir_use_size_file delivery_date_add envelope_to_add return_path_add

And add following lines to the authenticators section to allow interaction with Dovecot

dovecot_login: driver = dovecot public_name = LOGIN server_socket = /var/run/dovecot/auth-client server_set_id = $auth1 dovecot_plain: driver = dovecot public_name = PLAIN server_socket = /var/run/dovecot/auth-client server_set_id = $auth1

Done! Now let’s start exim:

# service exim start

Then we need to create a user ‘admin’ for our mailbox:

# adduser admin –s /sbin/nologin # passwd admin

If you’re already configured DNS records as we discussed before, you can now send mail to admin@iloveserversuit.com! However, it will only be stored locally. To retrieve it you’ll need a ‘dovecot’ package.

Installing dovecot

# yum install dovecot # chkconfig dovecot on

Edit file ‘/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf’ to allow plain-text auth:

disable_plaintext_auth = no auth_mechanisms = plain login

Edit file ‘/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf’ to set mailbox storage:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

And edit '/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf’ to allow Exim using Dovecot authentication:

service auth { unix_listener auth-client { mode = 0660 user = exim } }

That’s all!

You email client is all set up, and you got an admin account to use. You can follow these steps to add more accounts if you need them. Fundamentally, this is how you build a mail server.

But what's cool about ServerSuit, is that you don't need to go through all that. We have recently added Mail Server support to our dashboard. Once you sign in and have at least one server added, you can install a fully preconfigured "Easy Mail Server" from the software library! I think it's important to know how to set it up yourself, which is what the tutorial is for. But nothing beats not having to do it.



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