Recently I have consolidated mail for several of my domains onto one of my VPSs. I don’t have a lot of mail users so at first I stuck with the simple approach available to all dovecot/postfix installations, i.e. – using dovecot as the local delivery mechanism and simply telling postfix to hand off incoming mail to dovecot. Dovecot then has to figure out where to deliver mail. I also used a simple password file for the dovecot password mechanism. This mechanism worked fine for a small number of users, but it rapidly becomes a pain if you have multiple users across multiple domains and you wish to allow those users to change their passwords remotely. The solution is to move user management to a MySQL backend and change the postfix and dovecot configurations to use that backend database.

Now to allow (virtual) users to change their mail passwords, most on-line documentation points to the sork password module for horde. But have you /seen/ horde? Sheesh, what a dog’s breakfast of overengineered complexity. I flatter myself that I can find may away around most sysadmin problems. but after most of a day one weekend trying to install and configure the entire horde suite just so that I could use the remote password changing facility I gave up in disgust and went searching for an easier mechanism. Sure enough I found just what I wanted in the shape of postfixadmin. This is a php application which provides a web based interface for managing mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases on a postfix mail server.

Postfixadmin is easy to install and has few dependencies (beyond the obvious php/postfix/mysql). There are even ubuntu/debian packages available for users of those distributions. I also found an excellent installation howto at rimuhosting which I can recommend.

I can now manage all my virtual domains, user mailboxes and aliases from one single point – and the users can manage their passwords and vacation messages from a simple web interface.

postfixadmin domain creation

Whilst I currently only provide pop3s/imaps mail access through dovecot, postfixadmin offers a squirrelmail plugin to integrate webmail should I wish to do that in future.

Simple, elegant and above all, usable. And it didn’t take all day to install either.

“More than 30 hours without email…totally unacceptable. I’ll definitely have to reconsider my selection of gmail for my primary email account. It may be I have to pay for an account but hell will freeze over before I pay one penny to Google after this debacle.”

Umm, maybe it’s me, but I fail to understand how anyone can complain when a free service stops working. There is a good reason why people pay for services. Paying gives you the option of a contract with an SLA. If the service you are paying for includes storage of your data (as in the corporate data centre model) then your contract should include all the necessary clauses which will ensure that your data is stored securely, is reachable via resilient routes in case of telco failure, is backed up and/or mirrored to a separate site (to which service should fail over automatically in case of loss of the primary) etc. The contract should also ensure that you data remains yours if the hosting company fails, goes out of business or is taken over,

All of that costs money – lots of money in some cases.

Anyone who entrusts their email to a third party provider without ensuring that that they have a decent contractual relationship with that provider (though a paid contract) is, in my view, asking for trouble. Most email users nowadays are heavily dependent upon that medium for communication. I know I would have real difficulty coping without it. Outside of my work environment, I pay for my personal email service. And I am happy to do so. In fact, on some domains I own, I even run my own mail servers (with backups). That costs time and money, but it ensures that my email is available when I expect it to be.

So, google users, stop whining and think again. A proper email service will only cost you a few pounds – and there are plenty of other reasons for not using google’s email service (not least that fact that your email is scanned by google to enable them to target you with their adverts).