Open WebMail in CentOS

CHACHENG OO
Sr. System Engineer
DBL Group
BGMEA Complex( 12th Floor )| 23/1 Panthapath Link Road | Karwan Bazar | Dhaka-1215 | Bangladesh |
Cell: +8801755647625 Personel: +8801812490773 | Skype ID : chacheng.oo |
E-mail : chacheng@dbl-group.com Per : chacheng.oo@gmail.com or chacheng.oo@yahoo.com
Web : www.dbl-group.com

How to set up Open WebMail in CentOS

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# wget http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/redhat/rpm/release/openwebmail.repo
Now, Open WebMail can be easily set up using yum command.
# yum install openwebmail perl-CGI httpd

Configuring Open WebMail

First of all, the file /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/dbm.conf is updated with the following parameters.
# vim /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/dbm.conf
## the previous values are overwritten ##
dbm_ext
.pag
dbmopen_ext
none
dbmopen_haslock
no

Then Open WebMail can be initialized with an installed script as follows.

# /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-tool.pl --init
The index.html file for Open WebMail is also prepared by using a soft link.
# ln -s /var/www/data/openwebmail/redirect.html /var/www/html/index.html
[Optional] The domain name for the mail server is defined manually to avoid any future mistakes in the @domain part
of the mail address.
# vim /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/openwebmail.conf
domainnames

example.tst

The Apache web server is restarted.

# service httpd restart
# chkconfig httpd on
Finally, Open WebMail can be accessed by pointing the browser to the URL of the mail server: http://mail.example.tst
OR http://IP-Address-of-Mail-Server
Some screenshots are provided below.

Open WebMail in CentOS

Open WebMail login page:

Open WebMail interface:

Open WebMail preferences:

Troubleshooting Open WebMail

Open WebMail may generate errors or behave abnormally if specific versions of some Perl packages are not installed.
Fortunately, the packages are available in Open WebMail repository and are very easy to install. The following
demonstrates how to install problematic Perl packages.

Open WebMail in CentOS

A folder is created to store the packages. It could be any folder.
# mkdir /var/www/data/openwebmail/packages
# cd /var/www/data/openwebmail/packages

Packages are downloaded.

# wget http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/packages/CGI.pm-3.05.tar.gz
# wget http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/packages/MIME-Base64-3.01.tar.gz
# wget http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/packages/Text-Iconv-1.2.tar.gz

Install CGI.
# tar zxvf CGI.pm-3.05.tar.gz
# cd CGI.pm-3.05
# perl Makefile.PL; make; make install

Install MIME.
# tar zxvf MIME-Base64-3.01.tar.gz
# cd MIME-Base64-3.01
# perl Makefile.PL; make; make install

Install Text-Iconv.
# tar zxvf Text-Iconv-1.2.tar.gz
# cd Text-Iconv-1.2
# perl Makefile.PL; make; make install
To sum up, Open WebMail interface may be a bit old school, but it is a complete package pre-built with often needed
features. Besides, the installation process is easy, and the interface is very lightweight. Open WebMail is certainly a
worthy candidate when a simple webmail interface is needed.

CHACHENG OO
Sr. System Engineer
DBL Group
BGMEA Complex( 12th Floor )| 23/1 Panthapath Link Road | Karwan Bazar | Dhaka-1215 | Bangladesh |
Cell: +8801755647625 Personel: +8801812490773 | Skype ID : chacheng.oo |
E-mail : chacheng@dbl-group.com Per : chacheng.oo@gmail.com or chacheng.oo@yahoo.com
Web : www.dbl-group.com

Open WebMail in CentOS