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Postfix, Cyrus, Web-Cyradm on Ubuntu: Mail Server Setup Guide

Postfix SMTP and Cyrus IMAP/POP3 are highly efficient open source server packages with extensive production burn in. Add the excellent open source anti spam and anti virus tools, SpamAssassin & ClamAV, along with the Web-Cyradm for a half-decent domain+account control panel, and you get a production quality mail server competitive in most ways with top commercial offerings.

However, though the individual packages install and work, considerable tweaking is required to get the whole installation working smoothly together. Herein is a how-to for Ubuntu 8.04 server edition.

Looking for Quick Answers?

The rest of this page is a brief planning how-to. If you're looking for ideas to get unstuck or quick answers, you probably want one of these pages: DNS Preliminaries, Ubuntu Install, Postfix & Cyrus Install, Web-Cyradm Install, Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus Install, Lockdown, References, FAQs, Debug & Test Tips

Skills Prerequisites

A basic understanding of how email is delivered between mail servers, particularly how DNS MX records direct the sending server to the correct receiving server for delivery.

Understanding of Linux command line work, i.e., bash, and various Linux utilities: vi, ps, ls, grep, etc.

Some familiarity with email headers and SMTP.

On the other hand...

If you're tackling this project to learn these things (and much more) and are willing to bone up on the subjects as you go, this is an excellent learning project.

Capacity Planning

If you haven't already, choose and assemble the hardware you'll use for the mail server. If the project is educational, then you might use a virtual machine on your desktop or laptop. In that vein, though this project assumes a public IP address, with some clever use of hosts file entries and access to a DNS MX record, you can massage test emails through a virtual machine on a private network address (not covered in this article).

If the email service is for a personal, family, or small business server, modest hardware will do fine. A 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM will provide plenty of horsepower. You could run the base email services described here on 128MB or less (with adequate swap), but anti-virus, anti-spam, and webmail would thrash. Again, for a test/educational project, RAM is a non-issue.

Even for the family server, if everyone's counting on it, I strongly recommend a RAID 1 or RAID 5 setup. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID for background.) Such a configuration will save your server side mail storage in case a disk crashes, the most likely failure on a computer. Also, if your server is off the net for a day or more, email will start to bounce: Can't have that. Either get a RAID 1 card for under $100 and an extra disk of the same size (and model if possible), or skip the card and learn how to partition for Linux software RAID.

On the other end, if you're setting up hosting for a dozen or two small companies, or equivalent, with maybe 100 emails per minute "peak average", you'll want a dual or quad cpu 4+ GB RAM and fast RAID disk storage.

The configuration herein is for a single box. Beyond this capacity you get into multiple servers and network storage, a whole 'nether enchilada.

Outline of Steps, i.e., Table of Contents

A brief outline of the steps involved:

DNS Preliminaries - Get a static IP address for you server and setup an MX record for at least one domain.
Ubuntu Install - Get a stock Ubuntu 8.04 server up, running and on the net.
Postfix & Cyrus Install - Install the Postfix SMTP and Cyrus IMAP/POP3 packages, get them working together and establish basic mail service.
Web-Cyradm Install - Change mail authentication to use a MySQL database with Web-Cyradm to administer domains & accounts in that database.
Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus Install - Add Amavisd-new, ClamAV and SpamAssassin.
Lockdown - A few final security touchups.
References, FAQs, Debug & Test Tips - Log files to look at, debug tips, etc.

On To The First Chapter...DNS Preliminaries

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