Web Mail with Zimbra

With Zimbra you can organize your mail and appointments across the Web, as if you are using a desktop mail client  

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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Accessing mail on the move is not a new necessity. Nor is the desire of having a Web mail client, which is close to our desktop mail clients (like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution). But a Web mail client means a page refresh on clicking on anything, losing our focus and the important paragraph where we pointed our cursor on. But with Zimbra Web mail client, no more page refresh (thanks to AJAX technology). For an overview on AJAX you can refer to our article Creating AJAX Pages with ASP.NET 2.0, October 2005 issue. You work as if you are working with a desktop mail client, clicking your way through reading, writing and organizing mail.

Install Zimbra
Note that Zimbra is a self-contained package, meant to run out of the box. It bundles its own SMTP server (postfix), database (MySQL), LDAP (openldap), Web server (Apache) and application server (Tomcat). Some of these packages may not run if the Linux distribution (on which you install Zimbra) is already having one or more of these packages installed. We installed Zimbra on Cent OS 4 (www.centos.org). Cent OS is a Linux distribution which has been built using the sources of RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.  Installation of Cent OS is same as that for PCQLinux 2005. For the above-mentioned reasons, we choose not to install Sendmail, Postfix, Apache and MySQL during the installation.

Admin console is a one-stop page to set up multiple e-mail domains, aliases, distribution lists, anti spam and anti virus

You can download Zimbra from http://downloads.zimbra .com/3.0_M2/zcs-3.0.0_M2_740.RHEL4.tgz. Log in as root and extract the archive. This will produce a directory named zcs. Change to this directory and issue:

 ./install.sh

Follow the onscreen instructions. Note that whenever Zimbra prompts saying 'The system will be modified - continue? [No]' you must type in 'Yes'. For the remaining prompts, you can go for the default option. If you get an error regarding incorrect /etc/hosts file open the file named hosts found in /etc directory in a text editor and modify the line which contains the hostname for  127.0.0.1 to look as below:

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain localhost

User console is a Web mail client having an advanced search, intuitive organization of e-mail and calendaring

Subsequently, on the screen you will be shown a 'Main menu' where you will need to set up a password for Zimbra's administrative account. For this type in '5' and press Enter, then type in '6'. When prompted for, type in your preferred password. This password will be required to log in to the Web-based  Zimbra's admin console (see below). Type in 'r' and then 'a'. Continue following the on screen instructions till you get 'Configuration complete - press return to exit'.  After the installation, all the Zimbra services must start. To check upon this, issue the following:

su zimbra

zmcontrol status

The output should indicate a running status before all services.

Set up Zimbra
To log in to Zimbra's admin console, key in the following URL in a Web browser: https://<ip-address-of-linux-machine >:7071/zimbraAdmin/. On the login screen, login as admin@ localhost.localdomain and specify the password that you had set during the installation.

Note that a localhost.localdomain e-mail domain gets created by default. We will create a domain corresponding to our actual mail domain. Suppose the e-mail domain is it4enterprise.com and we will set up an e-mail account on Zimbra called shekhar@it4enterprise.com, to send and receive mail. We assume that you have an Internet mail server, which will be used to relay (send) mail and receive mail. 

After login into the admin console, click on @Domains and then on 'New' on the right pane. For 'Domain name' enter it4enterprise.com. Keep clicking on Next, leaving other values to default on the subsequent screens. Finally, click on Finish. The domain is created. Now we need to create an e-mail account. For this, click on Accounts and then click on New (on the right pane). Enter shekhar (say) for the Account name and select it4enterprise.com from the dropdown.

Type in a password (say secret123) and the last name and first name of the user. Click on Finish. Next, click on Global Settings and then on MTA. Fill in the hostname of the Internet mail server (say mail.it4enterprise.com) for 'Relay MTA for external delivery'. Zimbra provides out-of-box anti spam and anti virus to your mail, all installed and configured. The only thing left is to enable it. For this click on the tab Anti-Spam and check 'Enabled'. For the subject prefix type in ***SPAM***.  Click on the Anti-Virus tab and check Enabled. Click on Save at the top.

Send and receive mail
We are all set with the user shekhar to be able to send mail. User shekhar needs to log in to the Zimbra mail client (as opposed to the admin console explained above). Access the following URL in the Web browser:

http://<ip-address-of-linux-machine>/zimbra/

Log in as shekhar@it4enterprise.com with the password secret123. Click on New, compose a new mail and send it. To receive mail from your Internet mail server, you will need to use fetchmail. Create a .fetmailrc file in /root directory with the following content:

poll mail.it4enterprise.com

        proto pop3

        auth password

        via mail.it4enterprise.com

        user "shekhar@it4enterprise.com"

        pass "123456"

        is shekhar@it4enterprise.com

        keep

Substitute mail.it4enterprise.com with the hostname of your Internet mail server. Also substitute shekhar@it4enterprise.com and 123456 with the username and password of the user account on your Internet mail server.

Note that initially for testing purposes, it is advisable to have the 'keep' option, which will not delete the mail from your Internet server after retrieval. After successful testing, you may like to remove the keep option. Next run fetchmail as:

fetchmail -v -f /root/fetchmailrc

Alternatively you can use the fetchmail with -d option to retrieve mail automatically after a certain period of time. Refer to 'man fetchmail' for more details.

We leave you with the installation and setup to explore further about Zimbra-all through its intuitive and responsive Web interface-without page reloads!

Shekhar Govindarajan, IT4Enterprise