Installing SquirrelMail ======================= Table of Contents: 0. (QUICK!) Quick install guide 1. (PHP) Configure your webserver to work with PHP 2. (IMAP) Setting up IMAP (not covered) 3. (INSTALL) Obtaining and installing SquirrelMail 4. (RUN) Running SquirrelMail 5. (CHARSETS) Russian Charsets 6. (LOCALES) Translations of SquirrelMail 7. (PLUGINS) Installation of included plugins 0. QUICK INSTALL GUIDE ---------------------- Each of these steps is covered in detail below. - Install webserver and PHP (at least 4.1.0). - Install IMAP server (see docs of that server). - Unpack the SquirrelMail package in a web-accessible location. - Select a data-dir and attachment dir, outside the webtree (e.g. in /var). The data-dir (for user prefs) should be owned by the user the webserver runs as (e.g. www-data). The attachment dir (for uploading files as attachments) should be file mode 0730 and in the same group as the webserver. - Run config/conf.pl from the command line. Use the D option to load predefined options for specific IMAP servers, and edit at least the Server Settings and General Options (datadir). - Browse to http://www.example.com/yourwebmaillocation/src/configtest.php to test your configuration for common errors. - Browse to http://www.example.com/yourwebmaillocation/ to log in. 1. CONFIGURE YOUR WEBSERVER TO WORK WITH PHP -------------------------------------------- If your webserver does not already have PHP you must configure it to work with PHP. You need at least PHP v4.1.0. SquirrelMail uses the standard suffix .php for all PHP files. You can find PHP at http://www.php.net. See the documentation that comes with PHP for instructions how to set it up. The PHP IMAP extension is NOT necessary at all (but won't harm)! Below is a list of optional PHP extensions: --with-ldap Required for LDAP addressbooks --with-pear and --with-mysql For MySQL storage of preferences or addressbooks. You will need PHP compiled with --with-pgsql option, if you want to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. You will need PHP with appropriate database extension, if you want to use any other database. --with-openssl Required for encrypted IMAP or SMTP connections (TLS) --with-mcrypt Can be used by SquirrelSpell plugin for encryption of personal dictionaries --with-iconv or --with-recode Can be used by Eastern charset decoding functions --enable-mbstring Required for Japanese translation. Optional for translations that use non-ISO-8859-1 charset It is highly advised to NOT turn on register_globals, as this can lead to security holes. If you must use register_globals for some applications, turn it on locally for only those directories, or turn it off for the SquirrelMail folder. If you want your users to attach files to their mails, make sure File Uploads in php.ini is set to On. 2. SETTING UP IMAP ------------------ This depends a lot on the server your choose. See the documentation that comes with your server. If you're concerned about people accessing it directly, you can limit access to only the IP of the webserver. 3. OBTAINING AND INSTALLING SQUIRRELMAIL ---------------------------------------- SquirrelMail is constantly being improved. Therefore you should always get the newest version around. Look at http://www.squirrelmail.org to see what it is. If you want to be bleeding edge you might want to consider using the latest SVN version (with the latest and most fashionable bugs). a. Download SquirrelMail Get SquirrelMail from the address above if you do not have it or are uncertain if you have the newest version. Untar (again tar xvfz filename.tgz) SquirrelMail in a directory that is readable for your webserver. b. Setting up directories SquirrelMail uses two directories to store user configuration and attachments that are about to be sent. You might want to have these directories outside of your web tree. The data directory is used for storing user preferences, like signature, name and theme. You need to create this directory yourself. Recommended location is under /var, for example: /var/local/squirrelmail/data This directory must be writable by the webserver. If your webserver is running as the user "nobody" and group "nobody" you can fix this by running: $ chown -R nobody:nobody /var/local/squirrelmail/data Keep in mind that with different installations, the web server could typically run as userid/groupid of nobody/nobody, nobody/nogroup, apache/apache or www-data/www-data. The best way to find out is to read the web server's configuration file. There also needs to be a directory where attachments are stored before they are sent. Since personal mail is stored in this directory you might want to be a bit careful about how you set it up. It should be owned by another user than the webserver is running as (root might be a good choice) and the webserver should have directory write and execute permissions, but should not have read permissions. You could do this by running these commands (still granted that the webserver is running as nobody/nobody): $ cd /var/local/squirrelmail/ $ mkdir attach $ chgrp -R nobody attach $ chmod 730 attach If you trust all the users at your system not to read mail they are not supposed to read, you can simply use /tmp as you attachments directory. If a user is aborting a mail but has uploaded some attachments to it the files will be lying around in this directory forever if you do not remove them. To fix this, it is recommended to create a cron job that deletes everything in the attachment directory. Something similar to the following will be good enough: $ cd /var/local/squirrelmail/attach $ rm -f * However, this will delete attachments that are currently in use by people sending email when the cron job runs. You can either (1) make sure that the cron job runs at an obscure hour and hope that nobody gets upset, or (2) you can run a modified version of the commands above. Check out the man pages for other commands such as 'find' or 'tmpreaper'. One sample script you could set up that would erase all attachments, but wouldn't erase preferences, address books, or the like (just in case your attachment directory is the same as your data directory) might look like this: $ rm `find /var/local/squirrelmail/attach -atime +2 | grep -v "\." | grep -v _` Remember to be careful with whatever method you do use, and to test out the command before it potentially wipes out everyone's preferences. c. Setting up SquirrelMail There are three ways to configure SquirrelMail. In the config/ directory, there is a perl script called conf.pl that will aid you in the configuration process. This is the recommended way of handling the config. There's also a plugin called 'administrator' for the webinterface but you'll have to be able to at least log in to SquirrelMail first. You can also copy the config/config_default.php file to config/config.php and edit that manually. After you've created a configuration, you can use your webbrowser to browse to http://your-squirrelmail-location/src/configtest.php. This will perform some basic checks on your configuration to make sure everything works like it should. 4. RUNNING SQUIRRELMAIL ----------------------- Point your browser at the URL at which SquirrelMail is installed. A possible example of this is: http://www.example.com/squirrelmail It should be pretty straight forward to use. Some more documentation might show up one day or another. 5. RUSSIAN CHARSETS ------------------- For information on how to make SquirrelMail work with Russian Apache, see the russian_apache.txt in the doc/ subdirectory. 6. TRANSLATIONS --------------- In order to use translated versions of SquirrelMail, you need to download and install locale packages that contain translations that you want to use with SquirrelMail. Locale packages can be downloaded from SquirrelMail SourceForge project page. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=311&package_id=110388 Each translation contains an install script that copies the required files into their appropriate locations. If you can't run that script, you can extract the contents of a translation package into your SquirrelMail directory. NOTE No.1: *-src.tar.gz, *-src.tar.bz2 and *-src.zip archives do not contain compiled translation files. You will need to run the "compilelocales" script in order to get all gettext binary translations. NOTE No.2: You might need to restart your webserver before using translations. If you can't do that, install your translations _before_ you use SquirrelMail. 7. PLUGINS ---------- The SquirrelMail package includes some standard plugins. These plugins can be enabled in the SquirrelMail configuration script. Included plugins can use additional configuration files: * change_password configuration file is required. Without it plugin defaults to invalid backend. See plugins/change_password/README * filters, fortune, mail_fetch, newmail, translate configuration files are optional. See README files in plugin directories. * squirrelspell configuration is stored in plugins/squirrelspell/sqspell_config.php The default configuration might not work at your server. * administrator plugin must be setup correctly in order to detect administrative user. See plugins/administrator/INSTALL