GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Emacs Email Eye of Gnome Evolution Files File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks FreedomBox Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle OwnCloud Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Screens Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Swap Teradata Data Warehouse Themes TV Unity USB Version Control Video Video Processing Virtualization Voice over IP Web WebCam Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

Email Quick Start

A quick and easy installation will have you up and running with a Maildir-based mail system, supplemented with IMAP access, and a web-based email client.

Configure exim4 to deliver email to a user's Maildir folder in their home directory. This requires reconfiguring the exim4-config package which will take care of writing the correct configuration files (e.g. /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf). The aim is to set:

  LOCAL_DELIVERY=maildir_home

Exim4 creates the approriate Maildir folder and structure under the user's accounts as required. See Section 30.2.1 for more details on using exim.

Next, install courier-imap. This will then set up a server (on port 143) to deliver IMAP and any user in the password file can connect. Using mutt the server is imap://localhost/. For a secure IMAP server install courier-imap-ssl (which then uses port 993) and to access from mutt use imaps://localhost:993/inbox. If the IMAP server is only being used on a small local network (like at home) with access to it provided through a web mail tool (like squirrelmail) through a secure web server (using https, such as apache-ssl), then courier-imap-ssl is probably not required (since you would access the squirrelmail server through https, not your imap server)!

Now install squirrelmail and you can then log in to your IMAP server from any web browser (https://localhost/squirrelmail). Be sure that your apache-ssl server has index.php on it's list of DirectoryIndex files in /etc/apache-ssl/httpd.conf. You may also need to have some PHP packages installed, in particular php4-cgi. If the INBOX link of the SuirrelMail page is not active, edit /etc/squirrelmail/config.php to set:

  $oldway = true;