Internet History

By admin | Published:

Sorry, only in italian. A short list of  resources to know some basics of who, when, where, what of Internet history. Note, most linked resources are in english.

Courier Mail Server

By admin | Published:

Personal memo on how I did  install a working mail server Courier on my personal desktop machine, a Fedora 26 one.

Thanks so much to Sam Varshavchik without whose step by step help I couldn’t have made.
    1. My goals:
      1. to retrieve mail from my remote server (managed by a professional provider). I do that by fetchmail, and it transfers mails to courier;
      2. to manage mails by courier as my local mail server, in particular to be able to check them by the bundled webmail SqWebMail;
      3. to download mails by my local mail client (Evolution) from the local mail server. To do that, courier needs to listen to a pop3 port;

      Let’s see how I did

    2. I downloaded the following four tarball source codes:

    3. rpmbuild -ta each of them:

      Note: I was installing as root, but at some point I was asked to shift to a non-admin system user, say user myself (I do not remember when/why)
      Note: I had missing dependencies; I could install every missing package by dnf install <package>. Among other, I needed:

    4. hence, root and myself’s RPMS folders contain:

      and I could rpm -ivh all the rpm’s:

      Note: for courier-unicode, a older version seems to be sitting on Fedora 26, so first I needed to:

      then

    5. Now I had to define my mail users. I followed instruction at A simple userdb setup:  it is asked to create a system user, say vmail; I did that.
      I created file:

      (note, for some reason, on my machine it did not work with file at /usr/local/etc/authlib/userdb)
      I retrieved info about vmail by (check vmail line):

      and wrote them within /etc/authlib/userdb:

      for each of my users, I created MailDir:

      and wrote the relevant line of info within /etc/authlib/userdb (note I use gid, uid as vmail’s ones)

      to include the password I launched

      inserted the password at the prompt and got the file overwritten as

    6. I still needed to define the hosted domain. I looked for file /etc/courier/hosteddomains/hosteddomains, wrote therein the line mydomain.glt, and launched

    7. there was still a last step: to select Courier’s sendmail as the preferred mta (since Fedora seems to be shipped with postfix and original sendmail too)

      I may check with (long output is not pasted)

    8. Now I may launch the program I wish to use:

      Also, I may check:

      If I try to ship a mail by

      I may check that it pops up within the MailDir


      and I see it from within the webmail, at url http://localhost/cgi-bin/webmail?index=1

      Note: if you get a error msg, try >> setenforce Permissive.

       

    9. To download mail from the remote server, I use fetchmail. It needs a config file .fetchmailrc (to be saved within the main vmail folder) whose content is:

    10. last but not least, I wish to launch all I need at booting. This seems has to be done by creating files .desktop under the /root/.config/autostart/ folder
      whose content is, say for courier.desktop
      and similarly for the other ones.
UPDATE 31/12/2018. As I updated my machine to Fedora (27/28/) 29, I lost Courier. To have it back, I followed the following steps.
  1. I downloaded the following five tarball sources:

  2. them I build and rpm as it follows

  3. luckly, maildirs and users were not erased during the process. I may start services as before, albeit it seems I need to launch courier-authdaemon too:

 

Axigen. Thanks so much!

By admin | Published:

Mostly for the fun of it, I have been using the Axigen mail server on my personal desktop machine. Indeed, you don’t really need a mail server on a personal machine, but I was curious about it.

After more than ten years, they changed their policy about free license, and so I have to discontinue to use it.

As far as I can say, Axigen is pretty good, it worked seamlessly on my machine, and its GUI is very friendly, powerful I would say. A couple of time I needed help, then forum support was prompt and effective.

So, thanks so much to Axigen and its team. Good luck to you!

Axigen
https://www.axigen.com/

 

Axigen Forum
More than ten years ago!!!!