SquirrelMail 1.4.6 on RedHat Linux 9
Part 2 - Configuring SquirrelMail

Written by Tony Bhimani
April 1, 2006

Requirements
RedHat Linux
Apache HTTPD
IMAP Server
PHP with IMAP
SquirrelMail 1.4.6

SquirrelMail has now been installed and Apache is ready to serve our webmail site. Before we can use SquirrelMail we have to configure it to our specifications. Included in the package is a text-based menu driven system that makes configuring SquirrelMail easy. In the html folder there is a script called configure. By selecting menu choices and entering our server settings, preferences, plugins, and other features, configure will generate a configuration file SquirrelMail uses to render our webmail site correctly.

We start by moving to the html directory and running configure.

cd /home/squirrelmail/html/
./configure

You should now see the screen above. There are several options to choose from like Organization Preferences, Server Settings, Themes, etc. At the bottom is a prompt asking for a command. The command is the number corresponding to the items in the main menu. All you do is enter the number and press the [enter] key to be taken to that section of configuration. We'll start with Organization Preferences.

The item we'll want to change is Organization Name, Title, Provider link, Provider name, and optionally Logo and its dimensions. If you do change the logo then you should copy your logo to the images directory within /home/squirrelmail/html and use ../images/your_logo.ext when you specify it for option 2. Also be sure to change the dimensions with option 3 otherwise your logo may appear distorted on the webmail sign-in page. Go ahead and change the default values to those that represent your server/domain.

When you're done, type in R and then press [enter] to return to the main menu. Go to the Server Settings section.

The first thing to do is change the domain from example.com to your domain name. Once you have done that then we'll edit the IMAP settings using option A. All we have to change is the IMAP Server from localhost to our IP address of the server.

Conitnue on to change the SMTP Settings using option B. There are two thing we have to change and they're the SMTP Server and SMTP Authentication. Use your IP address instead of localhost. You may be asking why not just leave it as localhost? It'll work but your email headers will look odd. It'll say it's coming from localhost when people receive email from you. Plus there will be some nonsense about a non-authenticated user and apache@localhost showing up. There are others things I care not to list. Trust me, you'll want to use your WAN or LAN IP instead of localhost.

This next part about SMTP Authentication is optional. If you followed my Sendmail tutorial or configured your SMTP server with SMTP AUTH then you'll need to change option 7 from none to login. If you don't then you won't be able to send mail out - you'll get relaying denied errors. Proceed with option 7 and either let it auto-detect your authentication mechanisms or skip that and enter login.

When you're done the SMTP Server should be set to your IP and Authentication as login.

Return to the main menu and selection option 3 for Folder Defaults. In that section you'll see the Trash, Sent, and Drafts folders are INBOX.Trash, INBOX.Sent, and INBOX.Drafts respectively. You may want to change them by removing the INBOX prefix so they're more visually appealing.

Return to the main menu and proceed to General Options (option 4).

Since we moved the Data Directory outside our document root we'll have to change it. Mine is located at /home/squirrelmail/sqdata/ and option 1 will need to be changed.

Return to the main menu. I'll next show you how to configure the default CSS file from Themes (option 5). This is totally optional and you may want to skip it and continue on to the Plugins section.

From Themes do option 2 for CSS and set the default file to ../themes/css/verdana-10.css. You can change this later if you want to browse the themes/css directory for other style sheets.

Return to the main menu and go to Plugins (option 8). Plugins enhance SquirrelMail's capabilities and there are over 200 plugins available at http://www.squirrelmail.org/. One that you may be interested in is the Change_passwd plugin. It allows you to change your system password from within SquirrelMail. Adding a new plugin involves downloading the package, extracting its contents, moving the extracted folder to the plugins directory (/home/squirrelmail/html/plugins/ in our case), running the configure script, adding the plugin through the Plugins section, and then saving the changes to your config file. I won't be showing you how to do it in this guide.

SquirrelMail does come preloaded with some useful plugins like a calendar, spell-check, spamcop, and more. We'll be adding abook_take, administrator, calendar, delete_move_next, message_details, newmail, sent_subfolders, spamcop, and squirrelspell.

before		and after

Return to the main menu. There are other sections you can configure if you want, but for this guide we're done. The last thing to do save our new config file and exit the configure script. Press Q and hit [enter]. The configure script will prompt you to save your changes. Tell it to save them with Y and [enter].

SquirrelMail is now configured and ready to be accessed through our browser. We'll do that next.

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