SquirrelMail 1.4.6 on RedHat Linux 9
Part 1 - Installing SquirrelMail & Configuring the Apache Virtual Host

Written by Tony Bhimani
April 1, 2006

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

The SquirrelMail tutorial is the second part of a series I started this week on installing webmail access on a server. We began with setting up an IMAP server using Dovecot that provides the back-end and now we conclude with SquirrelMail being the front-end. This tutorial will teach you how to install and configure the SquirrelMail 1.4.6 package, set up an Apache virtual host for your webmai sitel, and verify your installation actually works. Before you continue you should already have Sendmail or another SMTP server and Dovecot or another other IMAP server installed and working. My Sendmail install uses SMTP AUTH to deny relaying abuse and that will play a part later on when configuring SquirrelMail. Dovecot should be configured as an IMAP server and not necessarily utilizing SSL/TLS. In Part 1 we'll download and install SquirrelMail and configure Apache for the webmail site.

At the time of this writing the latest stable version of SquirrelMail is 1.4.6 which is available at http://www.squirrelmail.org/. Once again the target operating system is RedHat 9. I know it's kind of dated and I promise one of these days I'll use a more up-to-date OS. We'll start by downloading the SquirrelMail package.

Make sure you're logged in as root and are in your home directory. Start by downloading the SquirrelMail gzip file using wget.

wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/squirrelmail/squirrelmail-1.4.6.tar.gz

Using tar we'll unzip the package and then move into the squirrelmail-1.4.6 directory that was extracted.

tar zxf squirrelmail-1.4.6.tar.gz
cd squirrelmail-1.4.6

SquirrelMail comes with a text-based configuration utility that makes creating the config file. We'll do the SquirrelMail configuration in the second part of this guide. Next we're going to set up an Apache virtual host for our webmail site. We're going to create some directories, move the SquirrelMail files to the document root, move the data folder outside the document root, and change ownership of the data folder to the apache user (or whatever user your httpd process runs as). I chose to install SquirrelMail in /home in a directory called squirrelmail. You may want to put it somewhere else like in /var or /var/www. It's up to you.

cd /home
mkdir squirrelmail
cd squirrelmail
mkdir html
mkdir html/cgi-bin
mkdir logs
mv /root/squirrelmail/* ./html/
mv html/data/ ./sqdata
chown -R apache.apache sqdata

Let me explain the structure. The html directory is the document root of the webmail site. We also create a cgi-bin directory for our own purposes (not SquirrelMail) if we ever need it in the future. A logs directory is created for our web server logs. The contents of the extracted squirrelmail tar.gz is moved to the html directory. We then move the data directory from html to /home/squirrelmail/sqdata - thus renaming it. It's not a requirement to rename it, it's merely so we know it's SquirrelMail data (your address book, preferences, signature and other files are stored there). We then recursively change ownership of sqdata to the apache user & group. SquirrelMail will need to be able to write to this directory and our httpd process runs as apache. Typically httpd runs as apache by default if you installed via RPM's. If you didn't change it in httpd.conf then yours should be the same.

Next we'll configure an Apache virtual host for our webmail site. If this is the first time you're configuring Apache then you'll have to edit two lines (ServerName and NameVirtualHost) located in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Use your machine's IP address for both of these directives.

ServerName 192.168.1.110
NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.110:80

Open /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf with an editor like vi or pico and scroll all the way to the end of the file. We'll add our new VirtualHost there.

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.110:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@domain.com
    ServerName 192.168.1.110
    DocumentRoot /home/squirrelmail/html
    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/squirrelmail/html/cgi-bin/
    ErrorLog /home/squirrelmail/logs/error_log
    CustomLog /home/squirrelmail/logs/access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

We created a name based virtual host and will listen on port 80. We use six directives to configure our site (ServerAdmin, ServerName, DocumentRoot, ScriptAlias, ErrorLog, and CustomLog).

• ServerAdmin specifies the email address of the administrator (that's you).
• ServerName is the IP address or FQDN of your site. I used an IP for this example but you'll want to use something like webmail.yourdomain.com. Be sure to add whatever host you use to your DNS zone file otherwise your webmail site won't be accessible. Read my BIND tutorial for more information on adding a new host.
• DocumentRoot is the path to your HTML files or otherwise known as your web site root.
• ScriptAlias is used to create a cgi-bin for executable CGI/Perl scripts. It's mapped to http://host.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/.
• ErrorLog defines the name of your web server error file for this site. Any 404, 500, and other HTTP or PHP errors will be written to this file.
• CustomLog creates a log of people that access your web site. At the end we use combined to tell Apache to use the combined format for log file entries. If you wanted to use a web server log analysis program like Awstats to parse your logs for HTML report creation then using the combined format is ideal.

Save your changes and exit your editor. We have to tell Apache to reload httpd.conf and this can be accomplished by restarting the httpd process (or using graceful).

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

That's it for getting your webmail site up. The next phase will be configuring SquirrelMail.

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