Installing A Web-Based Email Client

Installing A Web-Based Email Client - Part 2

Filed under Web Hosting

Yesterday I wrote a short tutorial on how to install Uebimiau. Today we’re going to see how to install another good webmail client, SquirrelMail.

This PHP webmail application has been around for quite a while. I don’t remember when it first came out but I know it already existed around 2001 - 2002.

Here are the requirements for this tutorial:

Linux / Unix OS
Apache
PHP
UW IMAP
SquirrelMail

How To Install SquirrelMail on Linux / Unix

First get your copy of SquirrelMail at http://www.squirrelmail.org/download.php. Extract it’s content to a temporary folder on your hard drive. Next, upload the content of the folder named squirrelmail-[version] to a directory on your webserver (i.e. /var/www/shared/squirrelmail). Make the apache user group the owner of the SquirrelMail directory:

# chown -R apache.apache /var/www/shared/squirrelmail

You now need to create a directory in which SquirrelMail will store its temporary files (i.e. /tmp/squirrelmail). Under this directory, create to other ones, one which will hold attached files and a data folder (i.e. /tmp/squirrelmail/data and /tmp/squirrelmail/attach). Again, make the apache user group the owner of the directory /tmp/squirrelmail and make the two subdirectories writeable by its owner group.

# chown -R apache.apache /tmp/squirrelmail
# chmod -R 0730 /tmp/squirrelmail/data /tmp/squirrelmail/attach

Change directory to /var/www/shared/squirrelmail/config and execute the conf.pl script with the -D switch to create the default settings.

# cd /var/www/shared/squirrelmail/config
# ./conf.pl -D

You will be taken to SquirrelMail’s configuration menu. Enter at least the information for Server Settings and General Options.

Edit your Apache HTTPD configuration file (i.e. /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) and add the following lines at the end of it:

Alias /squirrelmail “/var/www/shared/squirrelmail”

<Directory /usr/local/squirrelmail/www>
Options Indexes
AllowOverride none
DirectoryIndex index.php
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Now restart the httpd service by issuing the command service httpd restart. You should now be able to access SquirrelMail from any domain on your webserver using http://www.yourdomain.com/squirrelmail.

If you run into problems, you can run some troubleshooting test from http://www.yourdomain.com/squirrelmail/src/configtest.php.

SquirrelMail Inbox View

While SquirrelMail offers a lot less esthetic interface, it’s still a robust webmail client I strongly recommend. There are also many plugins you can add to SquirrelMail here.

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