E-Mail server hosting

Everything in the following page is directly taken (and adjusted to my liking) from The Gentoo Virtual Mail Server guide which is a deep and very detailed read on the topic. I will stray a little bit from that guide.

I will show you how to install and interconnect:

• Postfix, the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent)
• Dovecot, the IMAP server
• NGINX + PHP-FPM for web access (admin console + webmail)
• PostfixAdmin, the email configuration WEB gui
• Roundcube
• OpenDKIM
• OpenDMARC
• Spamassassin

Install Postfix and Dovecot

USE flags:

echo "*/* maildir dovecot sasl" >> /etc/portage/package.use/mailserver
echo "net-mail/dovecot managesieve sqlite lz4" >> /etc/portage/package.use/mailserver
echo "mail-mta/postfix dovecot-sasl sqlite -sasl" >> /etc/portage/package.use/mailserver 

Emerge the servers:

emerge -vp postfix dovecot

Since different pieces of the email infrastructure will need to interoperate, it is a good idea to create a specific user to store all the emails on the filesystem. This user will own the email storage folders which i assume will be located under /home/vmail. I choose UID and GID 5000 since the ones <1000 are reserved for system users:

groupadd -g 5000 vmail
useradd -m -d /home/vmail -s /bin/false -u 5000 -g vmail vmail
chmod 2770 /home/vmail/

The resulting permissions should look like:

ls -ld /home/vmail
drwxrws--- 3 vmail vmail 4096 Aug 2 07:24 /home/vmail

Now create the database:

su - vmail
mkdir db
sqlite3 db/vmail.sqlite3
sqlite> .databases
main: /home/vmail/db/vmail.sqlite3 r/w
sqlite> .tables
sqlite> .exit

This step is mandatory and critical for proper email delivery.

Install spamassassin & amavisd-new

postfixadmin and roundcube will be installed manually and not via Gentoo portage, to avoid upgrade issues.

Download latest release of postfixadmin from here and decompress in a folder accessible to the web user, since i use the web user to run all PHP based software on the external webserver:

su # do this as root! You don't need to make postfixadmin writable by the web user
cd /home/web
mkdir postfixadmin
cd postfixadmin
wget https://github.com/postfixadmin/postfixadmin/archive/refs/tags/postfixadmin-3.3.15.tar.gz
tar xvf postfixadmin-3.3.15.tar.gz
mv postfixadmin-postfixadmin-3.3.15 postfixadmin
#The following folder must be writeable by web user:
mkdir -p postfixadmin/templates_c
chown -R web postfixadmin/templates_c

Now, configure it by creating a file called postfixadmin/config.local.php with the following content (see postfixadmin/config.inc.php for all available stuff to configure):

config.local.php

<?php
$CONF['database_type'] = 'sqlite';
$CONF['database_name'] = '/home/vmail/db/vmail.sqlite3';
$CONF['encrypt'] = 'dovecot:SHA512';
$CONF['postfix_admin_url'] = 'https://mail.mydomain.com';
$CONF['admin_email'] = 'postmaster@mydomain.com';
$CONF['default_aliases'] = array (
    'abuse' => 'abuse@mydomain.com',
    'hostmaster' => 'hostmaster@mydomain.com',
    'postmaster' => 'postmaster@mydomain.com',
    'webmaster' => 'webmaster@mydomain.com'
);
$CONF['transport'] = 'YES';
$CONF['configured'] = true;
/* vim: set expandtab softtabstop=4 tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4: */

Now setup NGINX to point to it:

restart NGINX and go to the URL

FILE /etc/postfix/main.cf Binding UID and GID's to postfix

# Link the mailbox uid and gid to postfix.
virtual_uid_maps = static:5000
virtual_gid_maps = static:5000
 
# Set the base address for all virtual mailboxes
virtual_mailbox_base = /var/vmail