Comments on: Virtual mailboxes with courier-imap and postfix

By: kcpusa

kcpusa — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:47:21 +0000

Squirrelmail works quite well, login into your account using your email instead of just user name. I don’t think you need special configuration for squirrelmail except indicate which MTA (such as dovecot) you are using in squirrel configuration in pre-defined settings.

By: mate

mate — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:18:02 +0000

OK, it works well.
But if I want to install some kind of webmail, I need SMTP login on the server.
How can I make it with virtual postfix users?

By: kcpusa

kcpusa — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:51:05 +0000

I finally got my virtual mailboxes running. I can access my mails both through pop3 and IMAP. I am using squirrelmail to get my IMAP mails. I found a very detailed and very easy to implement article for virtual mailboxes using dovecot: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixVirtualMailBoxClamSmtpHowto, this includes shell scripts for adding and deleting users . Just one pointer, make sure you configure squirrelmail to reflect that you are using Dovecot in pre-defined settings for specific IMAP servers.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:15:21 +0000

I seem to remember using the Dovecot wiki to set it all up, and I don't think it was too painful. Turn up all the logging and check the log files (also, running dovecot in the foreground rather than as a daemon might give you some clues). For the last couple of years I've had all my mail hosting on Google hosted domains, so it's been a while since I've looked at this.

By: kcpusa

kcpusa — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:36:42 +0000

I changed my mta from courier to Dovecot. I am not sure how I would implement userdb, userdbpw and makeuserdb in Dovecot. I tried using command line but it does not seem to work. Any help? Thanks

By: Dan North

Dan North — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:40:05 +0000

It does work with both virtual aliases and virtual mailboxes, but you can't mix them within the same domain. A domain must be either a virtual alias domain or a virtual mailbox domain. Soon after I wrote this I took Steve Purcell's advice and shifted to Dovecot both as an IMAP server and for Postfix authentication. It made things a lot simpler and I was able to use the same password file for both Postfix (SMTP) and Dovecot (IMAP) authentication.

By: kcpusa

kcpusa — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:44:37 +0000

Great post!! Comments by matteo helped too. Everything seems to work well. Just one comment to newer users like myself: do not use virtual alias domains and virtual mailbox domains configurations together in main.cf – it is either or!!

My mails are being delivered to virtual mailboxes however I am perplexed as to how to access them. I tried using squirrelmail but I can only access mails for my hosted domain and not for my virtual mailboxes. Any suggestions??

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:39:48 +0000

OH SHIT! Here is the error:

# userdb fred set uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vhosts/example.com/fred mail=/home/vhosts/example.com/fred

You have to use the NUMERIC uid and gid, not the user and group’s name. It seems funny to me that nobody has mentioned this: does everybody understand as obvious that when you write “uid=vmail” you mean have to replace “vmail” with the numeric uid of user vmail?

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:32:20 +0000

I’ve followed all the steps. The only difference is I have the mail dirs in /var/spool/virtual/example.com/user1 (user2, etc) because I had followed another tutorial for setting up postfix.

However everything else is the same. Postfix works fine and actually delivers mail as expected (I have checked the files). However I can’t get courier to work. When I log into the imap server I get this error:

* BYE [ALERT] Fatal error: Account’s mailbox directory is not owned by the correct uid or gid:
Connection closed by foreign host.

The mail directory do belong to the user vmail of group vmail which are the uid y gid that are set in the userdb file….

Any idea?

thanks
m.

By: matteo

matteo — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:06:30 +0000

Ok I figured out the latter.
The problem was I was doing:

sudo userdbpw -md5 | userdb fred set systempw

But this way the pipe is “outside of the sudo”. So I got it to work by doing this:

sudo su
userdbpw -md5 | userdb fred set systempw