Friday 25 January 2013

A Free and Easy Way to Host Email on Your VPS - iRedMail

Woops .. I think it's been far too long since I have last updated this blog, so apologies about that.
I thought it would be prudent to provide a simple and brilliant way to host and serve emails on your VPS. The advantage of the procedure i will be covering means it makes it easy to host websites on a VPS as well.
So, it is possible - and advised by many - to manually set up an email server, here's a quick list of one common and possible collections of applications you will need for an Ubuntu email server:




Postfix + Courier IMAP + MySQL + Amavisd-new + SpamAssassin
 + ClamAV + SASL + TLS + Roundcube + Postgrey

That will cover every aspect you require to set up your email server, including a databse for users, web-, IMAP- and POP-based mail access and antivirus. That's fine and more power to you if you can set that up manually and getting working perfectly. I honestly did go through the entire process in order to manually configure an email server but I got stuck trying to correctly configure DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation.
Here's a lovely overview, courtesy of http://workaround.org/ispmail/lenny/bigpicture - side note: Bookmark workaround.org, it's another very helpful site which is great for geeking out and Linux Tutorials

Simple huh?!
So, long story short, after much research, tearing my (virtual) hair out and many server resets, I finally came across a fantastic and free (although there is a paid version) package called iRedMail. I honestly cannot recommend this package enough. At its core, it is a script that downloads and configures a number of software packages:

Postfix, Dovecot, Apache, MySQL, OpenLDAP, Policyd, Amavisd, ClamAV,
Roundcube, Awstats and Fail2ban

You literally answer a couple of questions and the entire system is set up for you. Brilliant. Not that you need it, but for a guide to install IredMail on Ubuntu, try here.
If, by some chance, you have followed my blog up to this point, now is the perfect time to install iRedMail, as you want a basically clean VPS to install it on as it will install everything you need to host and serve multiple websites, using what is known as "Virtual Hosts" with Apache2. Setting up Virtual Hosts will feauter as my next blog entry.

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