In this post, I will show you how to install a web-based email client (or webmail). Such an application can be useful to your clients (if you’re into web hosting) or yourself if you happen to work on various computers.
We’re going to install two different webmail applications: UebiMiau and SquirrelMail. Both are good webmail clients but I can’t say I’ve ever found any great ones. Email client softwares (like Outlook or Thunderbird) are still a lot ahead of any webmail application so far.
In the examples below, I’ll be installing both webmail applications into an aliased directory so that it will be available from whatever domain that is hosted on your server.
Installing Uebimiau
First grab yourself a copy of Uebimiau here and extract it’s content to a temporary folder on your hard drive. On your server, create a directory in which you will upload the extracted Uebimiau files. As I’ve mentionned earlier, we’re installing Uebimiau as a shared application between all websites hosted on your server so Uebimiau must not be uploaded into an existing website path. In my case, I’ve uploaded Uebimiau into /var/www/shared/uebimiau.
When you’re done uploading the application, create a temporary directory. This directory must not be browseable. I suggest you create a directory named uebimiau under /tmp (/tmp/uebimiau). Change the owner of this directory to the one your web server process is running as. Usually this user is named apache.
# chown -R apache.apache /tmp/uebimiau
Also make sure this directory is writeable by the apache user:
# chmod -R 0775 /tmp/uebimiau
Next open Uebimiau’s configuration with your favorite editor. For this example, the file is located in /var/www/shared/webmail/inc/config.php. Find the line which specifies the temporary directory folder and make sure it points to yours:
$temporary_directory = “/tmp/uebimiau/”;
Open your Apache’s HTTPD configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf in my case) and add the following line at the very end of it:
Alias /uebimiau “/var/www/shared/uebimiau”
Now restart the httpd service by issuing the command service httpd restart. Uebimiau should now be accessible through http://www.yourdomain.com/uebimiau. If not, look at your domain’s error log file. Chances are there is an open_basedir restriction in effect or safe mode in enabled in php.ini.
If the default settings do not work for you, have a look at the inc/config.php file. There you can set an array of servers with different settings for each.
Tomorrow I’ll post part 2 of this tutorial to show you how to install SquirrelMail so stay tuned.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] I wrote a short tutorial on how to install Uebimiau. Today we’re going to see how to install another good webmail client, [...]