[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

This is an old revision of the document!


Installing OpenWebMail in Slackware64 14.0

This article explains how to install OpenWebmail and configure it so that you can access your mailbox using a web interface from any place with internet access and a webbrowser available.
These instructions were tested on Slackware64 14.0 64-bit OS and the latest openwebmail-current.tar.gz (actually version 2.53)
It means, you are configured and running Apache web server and Sendmail mailserver.

Install libraries and required packages

Using CPAN via CPAN.pm:

perl -MCPAN -e shell                    [as root]
o conf prerequisites_policy ask

then:

install CGI
install Compress:Zlib
install Convert::ASN1
install Digest
install Digest::MD5
install IO::Socket::SSL
install MIME::Base64
install Net::SSLeay
install Text::Iconv

quit

Install OpenWebMail

  1. First, download latest openwebmail: openwebmail-current.tar.gz
  2. Create a directory wherever you want it, say “/ADISKS/openwebm_inst” and move the downloaded file “openwebmail-current.tar.gz” into that directory.
  3. Extract all files using the command
    tar -zxvBpf openwebmail-current.tar.gz

    Use “tar” with “-zxvBpf” option, due to strange file permissions inside that archive. I tried to untar it via midnight comander built-in archive tools, ans the wrapsuid script would not work because of this…

  4. Move the extracted directory “cgi-bin/openwebmail” to “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail
  5. Move the extracted directory “data/openwebmail” to your webserver's DocumentRoot (in a default Apache configuration, that will be “/var/www/openwebmail”)
  6. Change directory to “/var/www/openwebmail”, delete the file index.html and run the command
    ln -s redirect.html index.html
  7. Change directory to “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail” and run the command
    perl misc/tools/wrapsuid/wrapsuid.pl /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail

    You should see the following output:

    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-folder.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-main.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-read.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-send.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-cal.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-webdisk.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-advsearch.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-abook.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-viewatt.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-vdomain.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-saprefs.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-prefs.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-tool.pl
    Fixing /tmp/openwebmail/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-spell.pl
  8. Then go to “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc” and edit the configuration files:
    1. Change “openwebmail.conf” according to:
      domainnames             auto                                                                                                                                
      auth_module             auth_unix.pl                                                                                                                        
      mailspooldir            /var/spool/mail                                                                                                                     
      ow_cgidir               /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail                                                                                                        
      ow_cgiurl               /cgi-bin/openwebmail                                                                                                                
      ow_htmldir              /var/www/openwebmail                                                                                                                
      ow_htmlurl              /                                                                                                                                   
      logfile                 /var/log/openwebmail.log     
    2. Change directory to “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/defaults”, edit auth_unix conf to become
                                                                                                                                                                 
      passwdfile_plaintext    /etc/passwd                                                                                                                         
      passwdfile_encrypted    /etc/shadow                                                                                                                         
      passwdmkdb              none
    3. In directory “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/defaults”, edit db.conf as follows:
      dbm_ext                 .db                                                                                                                                 
      dbmopen_ext             .db                                                                                                                                 
      dbmopen_haslock         no<
      /code>
          - Then, change directory to "''/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail''" and run <code bash>
      ./openwebmail-tool.pl --init
  9. After that, go to “/var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail”, check that there are files starting with a dot (like “.openwebmail.pl”) and old-style filenames (like “openwebmail.pl)”. Set the suid bit for these scripts:
    chmod u+s openwebmail*.pl
    chmod u+s .openwebmail*.pl

Apache additional configuration

  • Add a .pl option to AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Links

Sources

 howtos:network_services:install_openwebmail ()