Dirk große Osterhues

[Sieve]: Sieve: filtering language
[Openmailadmin]: IMAP management frontend
[IMAP Idle]: Immediate notification of users about any mailbox changes
[IMAP]: IMAP: Internet message access protocol
[Roundcube]: Roundcube: browser-based IMAP client
[SASL]: Simple Authentication and Security Layer
*[MTA]: Mail Transfer Agent

This is a follow-up article on the previous post on how to Migrate IMAP Accounts from one Server to another.

Openmailadmin is an administrative interface to IMAP mailservers including cyrus-imapd. It requires a webserver (we use Apache), a database (MySQL in our case) and PHP of version 5.1 or later. Openmailadmin features a generic administration hierarchy and is fairy easy to use -- especially compared to a rarely used and rather cryptic cyradm cli-command.

Required Ubuntu packages

To setup Openmailadmin, this line needs to be run in order to install the necessities:

aptitude install apache2-mpm-prefork php5-mysql mysql-server-5.1 \
                 libphp-adodb php-log php5-idn

You might want to enable SSL in Apache2. If so follow the Simple activation of SSL for Apache2 in Ubuntu 10.10.

Get Openmailadmin

Now, it's time to get the Openmailadmin package. Create it's directory, download the package and extract it like this:

mkdir -p /var/www/ && cd /var/www/
wget http://static.ossdl.de/openmailadmin/downloads/openmailadmin-1.0.1.tbz2
tar xjf openmailadmin-1.0.1.tbz2
mv openmailadmin-1.0.1 openmailadmin && rm openmailadmin-1.0.1.tbz2
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/openmailadmin

Set up Openmailadmin

The next step is to access setup.php by opening https://www.{your_server_name}.tld/openmailadmin. If you installed all dependencies in the first step, you should be good to go to set up the Openmailadmin backend.

The second step in the setup frontend is a bit more complicated, yet quite well inline-documented.

Configuration of PAM

To make saslauthd work with your new databased authentication system, you will need to install the appropiate package:

aptitude install libpam-mysql                   

Also, you neet to adjust /etc/pam.d/imap. Replace these lines:

@include common-auth
@include common-account 

with these (don't forget to set the variables in the curly brackets with your settings):

auth    sufficient pam_mysql.so user={db_user} passwd={db_password} host=localhost db={db_name} table=user usercolumn=mbox passwdcolumn=password crypt=3 sqlLog=0
account required   pam_mysql.so user={db_user} passwd={db_password} host=localhost db={db_name} table=user usercolumn=mbox passwdcolumn=password crypt=3 sqlLog=0

This configuration uses MD5 for password hashes. To use SHA1, you may want to replace crypt=3 with crypt=4 and edit /var/www/openmailadmin/inc/config.local.inc.php accordingly.

After entering all your config data, you may use your new administrative frontend to cyrus-imapd at https://www.{your_server_name}.tld/openmailadmin.