On this page I describe how I setup my own mail server for personal use

Why have your own mail server?

I wanted to have my own mail server, for a number of reasons:

• I wanted to integrate email from several online accounts in one place
• I wanted to reduce spam , using my own spam filter on the incoming email
• I wanted to have my email archive independent of the ISP and/or the email client that I am using
• I was looking for a solution to have push email for my phone
• An integrated email /calendar solution that enables me to access my email in a number of different ways( I found that this is possible using Zarafa)

Design

I decided to build my mail server on a small Intel Atom powered PC. Linux was the obvious OS for me, because it is open source and there is a lot of software available to enable such a setup. Furthermore I was already familiar with Linux.

I chose Ubuntu as the Linux distribution for this server, as I am already familiar with Ubuntu setup and tools and I like it. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was the obvious choice , as it was the latest and greatest at the time of writing this article.

Based on previous experience, I picked the following software packages to build my email server:

• Getmail: Download email from several POP3 accounts to my mail server.
• ClamAV: one of the most common open source virus scanners. Every email that comes in will be checked for virusses before being delivered to the inbox .
• SpamAssassin: A commonly used spam filter.
• Maildrop: This piece is the sorting and delivery service for the emails.
• Zarafa: The email platform that allows me to access my email and calendar through IMAP and POP and even MAPI(Outlook). It can also be used to provide push email to your mobile phone and webmail.
• Exim 4: I am using Exim 4 for the outgoing mail.

Installation

I started by downloading the server edition of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and using that to install Ubuntu on the harddisk. The questions during installation are rather straightforward. When chosing the software packages, I installed:

• OpenSHH server (so we can also remotely control this server)
• LAMP server (this is useful because we need a MySQL server for Zarafa and Apache is used for the webaccess to the email)

Additional software

Let's first log in as root (super user) to further install and configure the server using the following command.

 
sudo -i
 

Now let's first bring our server up-to-date with this command

 
aptitude safe-upgrade
 

Let's install the tools to do get our email , do virus scanning and spam filtering and deliver them.

 
apt-get install getmail4 maildrop exim4 clamav-daemon clamassassin

 
#install spamassassin and some other packages for added functionality to spamassassin.
apt-get install spamassassin  libnet-dns-perl libmail-spf-query-perl pyzor razor  
 

Probably it will ask you to install some other additional packages as well... Well, now we need to configure all these tools and then we can install Zarafa.

Maildrop

Maildrop will actually filter your email through the spam filter and the virus scanner and it can also sort the email for you, if you'd like. I could have used something like Amavis to do the email filtering, but I used Maildrop also previously for my email sorting and I know how it works. It is not really fast, but it's fast enought to cope with only my personal email. A common way to configure maildrop is by creating a .mailfilter file in the home directory of your Linux user. For example /home/jeroen/. The .mailfilter file could look like this:

 
 
#let's first pass our email through the virus scan
xfilter "/usr/bin/clamassassin"
 
if ($SIZE <256000)
{
#and now through the spam filter
xfilter "/usr/bin/spamassassin"
}
 
if(/^X-Virus-Status: Yes$/)
{
 # if it's a virus, remove the email
  to "/dev/null"
}
 
if(/^X-Spam-Flag: YES$/)
{
#send spam email to a special folder in my inbox.
  to "|/usr/bin/zarafa-dagent jeroen -F spam -s"
# in the latest versions of Zarafa this is not necessary anymore, as the zarafa dagent itself will also look for the X-Spam-Flag header and put spam in the "Junk Mail Folder"
}
 
#if it's a normal email, send it to my Zarafa inbox
to "|/usr/bin/zarafa-dagent jeroen -s"
 

If you want to know more about maildrop, just use the maildrop manpages:

 
man maildrop
 

SpamAssassin

Even though SpamAssassin was already installed earlier on, it is not yet running. Under Ubuntu it is not enable by default. Go to /etc/default/spamassin and set

 
ENABLED=1
 

 
report_safe 0
 

Getmail

If you have maildrop setup, it's time to setup getmail to actually get your email. I execute getmail as my standard Linux user, not as root. To tell getmail where it should download the email, you'll have to create a folder called ".getmail" in your Linux user home directory. In this folder you create a file for each account that you have, named like getmailrc0, getmailrc1, getmailrc2, getmailrc3, etc. Use exactly this naming convention, otherwise getmail will not be able to find your account details. I will give an example for getmailrc0:

 
[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3Retriever
server=pop.youremailserver.com
username=yourusername
password=yourpassword
 
[destination]
type = MDA_external
path= /usr/bin/maildrop
user=jeroen
group=jeroen
 
[options]
#I want to keep the email on the POP server for 21 days before removing it
delete_after=21
# don't download all the email every time, only download the email I haven't downloaded yet.
#This is important if you don't delete your email from the POP server immediately
read_all=false
#Don't add a new Received header to the email, but use the existing Received header
received=false
 

Installing Zarafa

Start by downloading the latest version of Zarafa from their website at http://www.zarafa.com/download-zarafa. At the time of writing Zarafa 6.40 was just released, so I installed that one. If you would like to use Outlook and the need the MAPI support, download the version with 3 users Outlook support. Unpack the zarafa installation files using something like:

 
tar -xzf zarafa-6.40.0-ubuntu10.04-i386.tar.gz
 

 
./install.sh

You can still change settings to the Zarafa server in /etc/zarafa/server.cfg once you completed the installation. Because I prefer the attachments to be stored outside the MySQL database, I set :

 
attachment_storage = files

The first test

Webaccess for zarafa should be up and running now. You can test it by going to http://yourservername/webaccess/ and this should bring up the webaccess screen for Zarafa. You can log in with your Linux user account.But ofcourse your email inbox is still empty... Let's do something about that.

Getmail get's your email

I made the following small script that can be executed by crontab. It will actually download your email and it should end up in your Zarafa inbox. getmail.sh :

 
setlock -n /tmp/getmaillock getmail --getmaildir=/home/jeroen/.getmail --rcfile getmailrc0 
 

Execute the getmail.sh script with your regular Linux user (the one you also use for the Zarafa email access), not with root. If everything goes well, you should see getmail downloading your emails. Once the script is finished, you can log in to the Zarafa webaccess again to see whether it has succesfully delivered the emails to your Zarafa inbox.

Using Outlook to access your email

If you would like to use Outlook to connect to your Zarafa server, you first need to install the Zarafa Client (which is a kind of a plugin for Outlook. This can be downloaded from http://www.zarafa.com/download-zarafa

Zarafa backup script

I wanted a simple script to backup all my email to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) on my network. This NAS is already mounted as a NFS share on my Linux server. I use the following script to make a complete backup of all my email on the Zarafa server. First I make a dump from the Zarafa database on the MySQL server and then I make a backup of all the attachments seperately.

 
echo "Zarafa email backup"
 
# Setup variables for the archive filename.
day=$(date +%A)
daynumber=$(date +%u)
name="$daynumber-$day"
echo "name = $name"
 
if [[ ! -e /mnt/backup/Email/zarafa/$name/  ]]
then
mkdir /mnt/backup/Email/zarafa/$name/
fi
 
echo "Creating zarafa MySQL dump"
mysqldump --single-transaction -uzarafa  -pmyownpassword zarafa > /mnt/backup/Email/zarafa/$name/zarafa.sql
#now create a tar.gz file of all attachments
echo "Creating zarafa attachments tar"
tar -czf /mnt/backup/Email/zarafa/$name/attachments.tar.gz -C /var/lib/ zarafa
 

More information will be added. Please check back soon!