Configure a Dedicated Server with Webmin

Part 12 - Email Accounts

01-Introduction - 02-Installing Webmin - 03-Configure DNS - 04-Assign Nameservers - 05-Configure SFTP - 06-Setup Web server - 07-Let's Encrypt - 08-Setup Perl/CGI PHP - 09-Manage MySQL - 10-Setup Email server - 11-Setup SASL - [[ 12-Setup Email accounts ]] - 13-Email process - 14-Email antivirus - 15-Usermin - 16-Extras

Configure Email boxes

Navigate at Servers > Postfix Mail Server.
By clicking over "General Resource Control" icon you can modify how big your email inboxes are and some other important parameters for your email accounts.
Two important parameters to take note are:
Max size of a message: This option limits the size in bytes of a message that will be delivered, including the message envelope information.
Max size of a mailbox: The maximum size of an mailbox in bytes.
The default values are OK for start but you can modify them at your needs.

Setting up email users

Let's say we want to create two email accounts called: email@website1.com,
email@website2.com
Go to System > Users and Groups and click the "Create a new user" link.




Click the "Create" button.
Do the same for the user emailwebsite2

Notice : Generally you do not need any aliases for the email@website1.com since website1.com is the main mail server.
So if you create the user "email" this will work out of the box for the email@website1.com.
If in "Postfix Mail Server" > "Mail Aliases" there is an "email" alias you can delete it.

Virtual domains can be used for local or non-local addresses, while aliases can only be used for local address.
Since the base email domain is website1.com, we have to use virtual domains and not aliases for the website2 domain and so on.

In our example we could have done :
Email: email@website1.com User: email -> No virtual domain is needed
Email: email@website2.com User: email2 -> Virtual domain is needed

But since the account "email" is not self explanatory i suggest doing something like this :
Email: email@website1.com User: emailwebsite1 -> Virtual domain is needed (we could also have used an alias).
Email: email@website2.com User: emailwebsite2 -> Virtual domain is needed.

Setting up Virtual Domains on Postfix

As we have seen in our example we need to make two virtual domains for our two email accounts. Go to Servers > Postfix Mail Server and click over "Virtual Domains" icon.
Fill the "Virtual Domains" form like this :




Press "Save and apply" button.

Now again go at Servers > Postfix Mail Server and click over "Virtual Domains" icon.
Click the "Add a new mapping" link.
Fill the "Edit Map" form like this :




Click the "Save mapping" button.
Repeat for the second account email@website2.com

Click the "Add a new mapping" link.



Click the "Save mapping" button.

Finally stop and then start postfix
and stop and then start dovecot.

Our email system is set and is ready to use.

Sending and Receiving emails

Log into an external email account ex: freemail@yahoo.com Send an email at your newly created account email@website1.com
You can now check your mail box using Webmin.
Navigate to Servers > Read User Mail.
Click over the emailwebsite1 user.


You should have received a new email like the image below :


From the same interface you can also sent emails.

Since we have set up the IMAPS protocol now we are ready to configure an email client in order to receive and send our emails from email@website1.com. I will cover only Thunderbird as client the procedure is similar into any email client.
Run Thunderbird and click over File > New > Existing Mail Account.




Click the "Continue" button.
Fill the Mail Account Setup form like this :




Now you can receive and send emails using Thunderbird.
As we have alredy said, at the IMAP protocol, all the emails are stored in the server so we can access with different devices at our email account. The only downside is that if our server does not host any emails we will loose them from all of our devices.
In order to prevent this i suggest creating a folder "storage" into Thunderbird. (steps 1-3 at the image below.)
Now all the important Inboxed emails can be moved at the "storage" folder. (Steps a-d at the image below.)
Thunderbird will synchronize (and delete in case of server corruption) only the emails located at the Inbox folder.


In the next chapter we will discuss how we can process our received emails.
We are going to use SpamAssasun as spam filtering.

01-Introduction - 02-Installing Webmin - 03-Configure DNS - 04-Assign Nameservers - 05-Configure SFTP - 06-Setup Web server - 07-Let's Encrypt - 08-Setup Perl/CGI PHP - 09-Manage MySQL - 10-Setup Email server - 11-Setup SASL - [[ 12-Setup Email accounts ]] - 13-Email process - 14-Email antivirus - 15-Usermin - 16-Extras