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Documentation

Before You Begin

  • Decide what hostname you'll use for your new Mail-in-a-Box. You may want to buy a domain name from your favorite registrar now. For the most flexibility, assign a subdomain to your box. For instance, my domain name is occams.info (my email address is something@occams.info), so I've assigned box.occams.info as the hostname for my Mail-in-a-Box.

Get a Server

  • Get a server. I've been a long-time customer of Rimuhosting.com which provides cheap VPS machines at several locations around the world. You could also go with Linode.com or any other cloud or VPS (virtual server) provider that provides a static IP address. Don't use Amazon Web Services though: Many of their IP addresses have a bad reputation because they've been used to send spam.

  • Choose Ubuntu 14.04 amd64 as your operating system (aka a Linux distribution). You won't need much memory or disk space. 768 MB of memory (RAM) and 4G of disk space should be plenty.

  • Once the machine is running, set up Reverse DNS. Each ISP handles that differently. You'll have to figure out from your ISP how to do that. Set the reverse DNS to the hostname you chose above (in my case box.occams.info).

  • Log in with SSH. Again, your ISP will probably give you some instructions on how to do that. If your personal computer has a command line, you'll be doing something like this:

    ssh -i yourkey.pem user@10.20.30.40

You should see a command prompt roughly similar to:

root@box:~# (<-- blinking cursor here)

All command-line instructions below assume you've logged into your machine with SSH already.

Configuring the Server

After logging into your new server with SSH and becoming root, type the following in the console:

sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone https://github.com/joshdata/mailinabox
cd mailinabox

Now you've got the Mail-in-a-Box source code stored on your server. The next command starts the automatic configuration of the server:

sudo setup/start.sh

(Just a reminder, do this on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 machine only! If you're reusing an existing server, unpredictable things may happen.)

You will be asked to enter the hostname you chose and the public IP address of the server as assigned by your ISP.

After that you'll see a lot of output as system programs are installed and configured.

At the end you'll be asked to create a mail user for the system. Enter your email address. It doesn't have to be @... the hostname you chose earlier, but if it's not then your DNS setup will be more complicated. The user's email address is also his/her IMAP/SMTP username. Then enter the user's password.

It is safe to run the start script again in case something went wrong. To add more mail users, run tools/mail.py.

Configuring DNS

Your server is set up as a nameserver to provide DNS information for the hostname you chose as well as the domain name in your email address. Go to your domain name registrar and tell it that ns1.yourhostname is your nameserver (DNS server). If it requires two, use ns1.yourhostname and ns2.yourhostname.

For instance, in my case, I could tell my domain name registrar that ns1.box.occams.info and ns2.box.occams.info are the nameservers for occams.info. You'll also have to plug in the IP address of the machine.

Optionally, to activate DNSSEC, you'll need to get a DS record from the box. While logged in on the box, run:

curl http://localhost:10222/dns/ds

This will print DS records for the domains that your box thinks it is the authoritative name server for. Copy the DS record and follow the DS record instructions provided by your domain name registrar.

Checking Your Mail

You can access your email at https://hostname/mail, where hostname is again the hostname you chose at the start.

If you want to set up a desktop mail client like Thunderbird, your IMAP and SMTP server is the hostname you chose at the top. For IMAP, you must choose SSL and port 993. For SMTP, you must choose STARTTLS and port 587. Your username is your complete email address. And your password you entered during server setup earlier.

You're using a "self-signed certificate" for SSL connections, so you'll get security warnings when you try to read and send mail. It's safe to permanently ignore the warning the first time you see it (but not if you see the same warning later on).

Mail-in-a-Box uses greylisting to cut down on spam. The first time you receive an email from a recipient, it may be delayed for five minutes.

Checking that it Worked

You can also debug your DKIM (and SPF) settings with e.g. this tool. This site will also give useful information about your DNS and mail servers.