SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is a fully-featured web-based mail reader, powered by PHP.

Before Installing SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail requires PHP to be installed correctly on your web site, so please ensure that you have set up PHP before attempting to install SquirrelMail. SquirrelMail will work with PHP configured as either CGI or FastCGI.

Installation Instructions

Step 1 - Download the SquirrelMail package

SquirrelMail can be downloaded from the main SquirrelMail site. Make sure that you download the tar.gz version, rather than a rpm or deb package.

Step 2 - Configuring SquirrelMail settings

Extract the package into a sensible location, then run the configure script inside.

 cd /path/to/where/the/website/docroot/will/be
 tar zvxf squirrelmail-1.2.9.tar.gz
 cd squirrelmail-1.2.9

 ./configure

SquirrelMail has many configuration settings. We will cover just the core configuration options here, to get a simple SquirrelMail install up and running. The main configuration section to check is the 'server settings' page. Ensure that the options are correct to communicate with your mail server.

Next, the permissions for the 'data' directory used by SquirrelMail must be checked. This directory must be readable and writable by the same user that the PHP page generator runs as. Typically, this is user 'daemon', although you may have configured this differently. As root, set the ownership of the data directory:

chown -R daemon:daemon data

For extra security, the SquirrelMail developers recommend moving the data directory outside of the document root (normally it would exist as '/data'). If you do this, don't forget to reconfigure SquirrelMail and tell it where the new data directory resides.

Step 3 - Configure the virtual server

The virtual server that will be running SquirrelMail must already have PHP set up, as explained earlier. There are also a few other settings that will need changing.

Check the document root of the virtual server. If you want SquirrelMail to be at the very front page of the site, either adjust the docroot so that it points to the squirrelmail-1.2.9 directory, or move the contents of that directory into the correct location. SquirrelMail can also exist as a subdirectory on the site, e.g. '/mail/'.

You will also need to visit the 'directory listings' section of the virtual server configuration. In the box listing the index files, add in the filename 'index.php'. This allows PHP to generate the main page for a directory on the server.

If you are providing remote mail access, then we recommend securing the site using SSL. Otherwise, your mail users' passwords could in theory be captured as they log in over the Internet.

After making these changes to the virtual server, don't forget to commit the changes and restart the site!

Troubleshooting

SquirrelMail should run fine, as long as PHP is set up correctly on your virtual server. So if you have problems even viewing the login screen of SquirrelMail, you should test if simple PHP pages get displayed correctly. A simple test of this is to use PHP's builtin 'phpinfo()' function. In the document root of your web site, create a file called 'test.php' with the following contents:

<? phpinfo(); ?>

Now, fetch this file in a web browser. If PHP is running correctly, a full page of information about PHP should be displayed.

If things still aren't working, check the error log file for messages about potential problems. This is located at $ZEUSHOME/web/log/errors.

Content Manager [Administrator] 16 December 2005