Installing SquirrelMail ======================= Table of Contents: 1. (PHP4) Configure your webserver to work with PHP4 2. (IMAP) Setting up IMAP (not covered) 3. (INSTALL) Obtaining and installing SquirrelMail 4. (RUN) Running SquirrelMail 5. (CHARSETS) Russian Charsets 1. CONFIGURE YOUR WEBSERVER TO WORK WITH PHP4 --------------------------------------------- If your webserver does not already have PHP4 you must configure it to work with PHP4. SquirrelMail uses the standard suffix .php for all PHP4 files. This is a quick and dirty guide to installing PHP4 to run as CGI under Apache. How you end up doing this is up to you (your mileage may vary). NOTE: The new plugin architecture required the use of some functions which are not in all versions of PHP4. You will need at least PHP4 v4.0.4. If you need to upgrade please go ahead and install the latest release version of PHP4. a. Obtaining and compiling PHP4 Point your favorite webserver at http://www.php.net/version4/ and download the source. Untar (tar xvfz filename-you-downloaded.tgz) the source, cd into the directory and run configure. To make PHP4 work with SquirrelMail a commandline like this should do: ./configure --enable-track-vars --enable-force-cgi-redirect --with-gettext If you have a database like MySQL you might want to add something like --with-mysql to get database functionality. If you're going to use LDAP in the addressbook, you must compile PHP4 with --with-ldap (see the PHP4 docs for more information). Run make to build the binary file. This will generate a binary file called "php". Move this file into a CGI-directory. You might also want to read the INSTALL file in the PHP-distribution :-) b. Changing php.ini PHP defaults to look for php.ini (PHP's configuration file) in /usr/local/lib. However, for security reasons, it is suggested that the location of this file is changed to someplace else. This can be done at configure time with the configuration directive --with-config-file-path=PATH. Edit the php.ini file and make sure session.use_cookies is 1. Also be sure to change the session.save_path to someplace that can only be read and written to by the webserver. session.save_path is the location that PHP's session data will be written to. SECURITY WARNING - If a user has access to write PHP scripts on your system and knows the location where PHP stores session data, he could get a listing of the sessions being used and then read a given session's data with his own PHP script. Caution should be used when setting up permissions and locations of php.ini and the session data. FILE UPLOADS - Note that sending attachments will not work if your "file_uploads" setting is "Off". Squirrelmail requires that setting enabled in order to be able to attach files. c. Setting up .php files to use PHP4 You need to create a .htaccess file in you SquirrelMail directory that looks something like this: AddType application/php4script .php Action application/php4script /cgi-bin/php You could also add these lines to your Apache configuration file. d. Running into trouble Setting up Apache with PHP4 can be a non-trivial task. Read the PHP4 and Apache documentation carefully if you run into trouble. If you have an experienced system administrator around ask her/him to help you. 2. SETTING UP IMAP ------------------ This is not covered here :-/ 3. OBTAINING AND INSTALLING SQUIRRELMAIL ---------------------------------------- SquirrelMail is still under development. Therefore you should always get the newest version around. Look at http://www.squirrelmail.org/index.php3?page=5 to see what it is. If you want to be bleeding edge you might want to consider using the latest CVS version (with the latest and most fashionable of 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. When unpacking the sources this directory is created as data/ in your SquirrelMail directory. This directory must be writable by the webserver. If your webserver is running as the user "nobody" you can fix this by running: $ chown -R nobody data $ chgrp -R nobody 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 write and execute permissions on the directory, 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/some/place $ mkdir SomeDirectory $ chgrp -R nobody SomeDirectory $ chmod 730 SomeDirectory If you trust all the users on you system not to read mail they are not supposed to read change the last line to chmod 777 SomeDirectory or 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/attach/directory $ 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/attach/directory -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 two 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. You can also copy the config/config_default.php file to config/config.php and edit that manually. 4. RUNNING SQUIRRELMAIL ----------------------- Point your browser at the URL at which SquirrelMail is installed. A possible example of this is: http://www.yourdomain.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 README.russian_apache in the doc/ subdirectory.