10 minutes to quickly build Linux system under Webmail

At present, the Internet can find a lot of webmail software, but more for commercial software, easily support millions users. Although they are very powerful, but for the general unit, a bit "overqualified." So, can you find such a webmail: free, good support for Chinese, can allow users to both retain the original use of the habit and through the Web interface to send and receive mail?

Open Webmail is written by Perl, follows the GPL copyright, can run on a variety of versions of Linux/unix, low system requirements, only need to have a CGI-enabled Web server and Perl version 5.005 and above, no database support, easy installation and maintenance convenience. As a lightweight webmail software, Open webmail better realize the functions of sending and receiving mails, and can satisfy the general application. It is low in system requirements, easy to maintain, and is suitable for use in scientific research institutes and colleges and universities. The author's laboratory (Operating environment: Mail server DELL l667r, configured for Pⅲ667mhz/128m/15gb,redhat6.2/apache 1.3.12/perl 5.005_03, the number of users 120) has been used for more than half a year, running well, has been recognized by the user.

The following is an example of Redhat 6.2, which describes the installation method for open WebMail. We assume that all software is stored in the/tmp directory, and that all operations are done as root.

1. Preparatory work

Download the following packages from the Web:    CGI.pm-2.74.tar.gz
    MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz
    Authen-PAM-0.12.tar.gz
    ispell-3.1.20.tar.gz
    hc-30.tar.gz

Take cgi.pm For example, the installation method is as follows:    cd /tmp
    tar -zxvf CGI.pm-2.74.tar.gz
    cd CGI.pm-2.74
    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make install

Other packages are installed similarly.

2. Download openwebmail-x.xx.tgz (where x.xx is version number, stable version 1.51 as of November 2001), do the following:    cd /home/httpd
    tar -zxvBpf /tmp/openwebmail- X.XX.tgz
    mv data/openwebmail html/
    rmdir data

3. Configure

(1) Modify openwebmail.pl, openwebmail-main.pl, openwebmail-prefs.pl and/home/httpd/cgi-bin/openwebmail in the catalogue. spellcheck.pl and checkmail.pl, change the/usr/local/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail to/home/httpd/cgi-bin/openwebmail.

(2) Modify auth_unix.pl set to/etc/shadow

(3) Modify/home/httpd/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/openwebmail.conf, adjust Mailspooldir, Ow_htmldir, Ow_cgidir, spellcheck according to machine configuration and set the default parameters for Webmail, such as folder limit, idle time, background, default signature file, and so on.

(4) Modify/ETC/SENDMAIL.CF and add Thttpd_user to trusted users, where Httpd_user is set according to system settings, such as nobody or Apache.

4. Test: Open the browser, input your_server/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail.pl can be.

At this point, the Open WebMail installation is complete. Installing on other versions of Linux is similar to this, please refer to the documentation in the package. For Linux skilled users, the above operation can be done in 10 minutes.