It’s so shiny and new feeling. Can you still smell that new server smell? No? Well maybe you can’t but It’m still proud of it. Right now the new CentOS server is running two websites, this one and Clark Construction which still hasn’t been completed yet. This is my first time using Apache and so far it’s been relatively painless. I know one thing PHP sure was easy to install. In fact I didn’t have to install it since the Apache and PHP packages were installed when I built the server.

I’ve also got the mail server configured and tested but haven’t brought it live yet. I’m using sendmail and dovecot for SMTP and IMAP, and SquirellMail for webmail. The interesting part will be getting all the old mail transferred over from my old server.

I recently installed and finished setting up SquirrelMail. I thought it might be helpful for some if I wrote a guide for installing and maintaining squirrelmail.
The first thing you’ll need are the latest version of Squirrelmail (I’ll refer to this by SM from now on) which at the time of writing was 1.5.1 was the latest development build and the only one that currently works with PHP v. 5 which I had installed earlier for the purposes of this blog.
Later I will publish a guide for installing PHP. The next thing you need is an IMAP capable server (I’m using hMailServer). Then since I installed SM on a windows 2000 server, I needed a copy of PERL (not necessary because you can edit the config by hand but just makes life easier). The first thing you want to do is unzip the SM files to a location outside of your inetpub folder for security reasons. Then you will want to create a virtual directory under IIS, make sure that this directory is writable because you will be uploading data to SM.

After that you want to run the PERL script located in SM under the config folder named conf.pl. Just go through all the options changing them to suit your needs. The main ones to pay attention to are the ones concerning the type of IMAP server you have and where the server is if it’s not located on the same machine. After getting everything configured you should try logging in. If your able to correctly login and receive and send mail congratulations you’ve setup SM.

The next thing you should do is search through the plugins section of SquirrelMail and find ones that would make you SM experience easier. The ones I recommend are the administrator plugin which allows you to remote access and change your config file. Also the admin_add plugin to easily add admins for the SM installation. I also activated the spam filters, calendar, newmail options, and the spell checker that are included in 1.5.1. A word on the Spell Check you will need another program in order for the spell check to work on windows. It’s called Aspell, there is a guide on installing Aspell for windows here under the windows section. After installing all the plugins that you needed, your SquirrelMail experience should be great.

I figured someone might be interested in the kind of server that I’m running. It’s an AMD XP 3000+ with 1.5 GB of Ram, 250 GB ATA 133 HD, 1Gbit NetGear NIC, and a CD-Rom drive. It was pieced together from a couple of my older computers when I recently upgraded my gaming computer. This is the third iteration of my server, one was temporary while switching from an older PC to the newer hardware

It’s currently running windows 2000 server with AD. I use IIS with FTP and Web services. I have PHP 5 installed along with MySql for use with my webmail. Which now I’m using squirrelmail exclusively with IholaMail as my backup. The email server is hMailserver a very good open source imap pop3 smtp server. The total cost of all this was the orginal price of the parts and the electricity to run it. Everything else was either free or I somehow obtained a copy of it.

I’ve recently been playing with webmail for my email server here. I’ve been testing out squirrelmail and it seems pretty solid. I’ve created a logo for the webmail and was wondering which to use.