Table of Contents
+Table of Contents
About $15/month. You’re going to become your own Internet service provider — an ISP. It’s going to cost a little bit of money to do so, but not much and you can divide it among friends and share your Mail-in-a-Box if you’d like to split it up. Most of the cost is in having a (virtual) machine connected to the Internet 24/7.
+There’s also your time. Once a Mail-in-a-Box is set up, we hope it “ just works” but when you are your own systems administrator you must be prepared to resolve issues as they arise.
+Your box may manage the email for multiple email addresses. While logged in with SSH (see above), run:
-tools/mail.py+
sudo tools/mail.py
This command will help you add and remove email accounts and email aliases (forwarders).
@@ -331,6 +346,47 @@ cd mailinaboxWhen you purchase an SSL certificate you will receive a certificate in PEM format and possibly a file containing “intermediate certificates” in PEM format. If you receive intermediate certificates, use a text editor like Notepad or Gedit and paste your certificate on top and then the intermediate certificates below it. Save the file and place this combined file onto your box in the location indicated by the whats_next script.
Put static files in /home/user-data/www/default.
Your box will immediately begin serving a simple, default static website at the box’s hostname (you already saw webmail there) and on any domain that you set up an email address for.
+ +Replace the files in /home/user-data/www/default on your box with any HTML pages and other static files for your own website. You will probably need to use an SSH file transfer program such as FileZilla or scp. (Use the same login credentials as when you connected with ssh.)
+ +If you want a different website to appear at different domain names, put the files instead in /home/user-data/www/[your.domainname.com]. Then run:
+ +sudo tools/web_update+ +
to update the web configuration so that it knows the new location of the static files.
+ +The box also provides support for Webfinger, which is a web-based protocol, if you have installed a signed certificate for the domain.
+ +If you want to have the box host a static website on a domain that you have’t set up an email address for, create a dummy email address on the domain (see above for how to do that). Then run the whats_next.py script as described in the previous section to ensure it is set up correctly.
+ +Although your box is handling mail for your domain name, it is actually possible to host a website on another machine by using custom DNS. See below.
+ +Your box is managing the DNS for your domain names. If you run other web services on other machines, you may want to create custom DNS records.
+ +Create a file named /home/user-data/dns/custom.yaml and put in it custom DNS settings in this format:
+ +www.yourdomain.com: 72.249.66.164+ +
or
+ +www.yourdomain.com: + CNAME: otherserver.com.+ +
After modifying this file, run:
+ +sudo tools/dns_update+ +
to update the DNS settings.
+ +Mail and web are handled by separate types of DNS records. You can actually override the DNS for any domain you have an email address at — except the box’s hostname itself — to have the domain's website served by another machine without affecting its email.
+It is also possible to...