Installing SquirrelMail ======================= Table of Contents: 0. (QUICK!) Quick install guide 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 6. (LOCALES) Translations of SquirrelMail 0. QUICK INSTALL GUIDE ---------------------- Each of these steps is covered in detail below. - Install webserver and PHP4 (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 (eg 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 PHP4 --------------------------------------------- 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 PHP4 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 neccessary at all (but won't harm)! Below is a list of optional PHP extensions: --with-ldap Required for LDAP addressbooks --with-mhash Will improve charset decoding if present --with-mysql For MySQL storage of preferences or addressbooks --with-openssl When you want to use encrypted IMAP connections (TLS) If you're going to use LDAP in the addressbook, you must compile PHP with the LDAP extension. Include the MHASH extension to improve performance in character set decoding. 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 CVS 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. 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. 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 config 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.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. 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 install script that copies required files into appropriate locations. If you can't run that script, you can extract contents of translation packages into your squirrelmail directory. NOTE No.1: *-src.tar.gz, *-src.tar.bz2 and *-src.zip archives does not contain compiled translation files. You will need to run 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.