Mailboy

Ready.

Latest: version 0.4.3

I wrote Mailboy with the intent of this to be a complete web interface for administrating email accounts. It uses a setup with Postfix, Dovecot and Amavis based on the great Workaround.org ISP style tutorial. This web administration interface can work if you have the Etch setup or the Lenny setup (instructions included below).

Mailboy features:

• Server admin users - users that are "admin" may do anything
• Per domain admins - a user may be admin for just one or more specific domains
• Users may change their password and Amavis policy
• Manage relay domains - so you can become backup MX for others
• Easy to theme - The appearance can be completely taken care of, 2 themes are included (for now)
• Released under GNU General Public License

The modifications I made to the Workaround tutorial setup:

• Database: entries must be unique (aliases, domains)
• Database (lenny): I brought back the "views" because I prefer that
• Database: foreign keys are all over the place to make things easier to maintain
• Database: added tables for Relay domains, per user amavis settings and quota
• Database: create mailadmin user
• Database: other changes made for the admin interface to work
• Postfix: Mysql queries in configuration needs to be changed
• Postfix: Add Mysql file and configuration for Relay domains (optional)
• Dovecot: Mysql queries in configuration needs to be changed
• Dovecot: Modify configuration to add per user quota (optional)
• Amavis: Add option to change subject for spam (applies when user policy says "modify subject Y)
• Amavis: Edit configuration file to enable per user scan policies

Why so many changes ?

One reason is that the database layout on Etch edition used to please me, now for performance reasons Christoph Haas decided to do without requiring views, I'm sure that does make a difference on big setups,for me it means that the data can possibly be incoherent. That also goes for the domain and alias table have UNIQUE keys to ensure there are no duplicate entries. All this means the database scheme is a bit different and so the programs need to query Mysql in a tiny bit different way, it's not that complicated.

Another reason was to enable per user Amavis scanning, meaning you can setup a few policies and users may chose which one they want. This includes settings such as Tag levels, or bypassing certain tests. Users should be able to chose to not have their emails scanned or not have certain checks performed, it can be useful when a user is trying to receive a particular email with an attachment, user can deactivate file checks by him/her-self.

Modifying a server based on the Workaround tutorial does not take long, if you include careful reading a creating backup files as you go this should take less than 30 minutes.

What does this look like ?

A few screenshots will better describe this:

Ok, lets do it !!

PLEASE TRY THIS ON A TEST SERVER FIRST, you can try it out using a test server be it a real one or via something like VirtualBox. You should always do this when installing any software on a production server. This means that you can possibly break your email server if you do not know what you are doing and are not patient. So take your time in a test environment.. If you are working on an email server I assume you know what you are doing anyways. :]

First thing

You will need a mail server that should be based on the Workaround.org ISP style email tutorial (Don't worry if you are still using the Etch version, it'll in fact be even easier). If you have not installed your mail server than follow the tutorial, it's a good document in that the instructions are precise yet complete, it doesn't lack explanations (so you can actually learn what's going on) and mostly it works just fine. You can for sure manage to use Mailboy in other situations but for that you are on your own (unless you hire me). :]

This page contains information for upgrading from Etch tutorial and Lenny tutorial, all steps are for both systems unless they are color coded as follows:

Everything else is for both

DB operations

We need to change the way the database looks and add new tables, the simplest way is to (you should know how to do this):

1. Export/backup the required data (virtual_domains, virtual_users, virtual_aliases)
2. Drop all the tables on database 'mailserver'
3. Create new database scheme

   For this there is an included file called database.sql which basically can be copy pasted to PhpMyAdmin or to Mysql shell...

4. Insert old data
   The data from Etch tutorial should be compliant with the new database structure unless there are double entries.
   On Lenny tutorial user is called "email", we'll need to replace email by user. like this: INSERT INTO `virtual_users` (`id`, `domain_id`, `password`, `email`) VALUES should become: INSERT INTO `virtual_users` (`id`, `domain_id`, `password`, `user`) VALUES We also need to replace things like user@domain.tld to just user. With a text editor you can find and replace, using vim you can use: :%s/@.*'/'/

   The same issue occurs with the table virtual_aliases, the source field should be without the "@domain.tld" part, use the vim trick to get rid of that crap

5. Add mailadmin user.

   This user can read/write/delete from the mailserver database, it is needed by Mailboy. From within mysql you may simply type (replace password of course!)

   GRANT SELECT , INSERT , UPDATE , DELETE , CREATE , DROP , INDEX , ALTER , CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES , CREATE VIEW , SHOW VIEW , CREATE ROUTINE, ALTER ROUTINE, EXECUTE ON mailserver . * TO 'mailadmin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'crazy_secure_password'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES ;
6. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you get an error like ""constraint exists blah blah" it is probably just because the data is not inserted in the correct order (and so an email cannot exist unless the domain it's referenced to by domain_id exists). Just insert data in this order:
   1. virtual_domains
   2. virtual_users
   3. virtual_aliases

Postfix configuration

To add the Relay domain functionality add the new file /etc/postfix/mysql-relay-domains.cf and inside write:

change permissions

configure Postfix to use the new file

If you want to scan aliases addressed to accounts on this server according to the destination account's Amavis settings we should remove the no_address_mappings from main.cf, and add it to master.cf.

comment or delete from main.cf:

add in master.cf:

Because we modified some things you might want to restart Postfix

Dovecot

To enable per user quota we also need to edit /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. We need to search for the sections protocol imap { and add:

and protocol pop3 { mail_plugins = quota

and protocol lda { mail_plugins = cmusieve quota

You may now restart Dovecot