A step by step guide on how to install Squirrelmail on FreeBSD
Squirrelmail is a very popular very fast webmail client with Imap, Pop and Smtp support. While very popular it’s also very ugly but considering the lightweight and speed that’s perfectly acceptable. Squirrelmail also has a huge load of ready to run plugin’s making your life easier.
Now this is one of the few applications I don’t install from ports but from source. Reason it’s not worth it. Squirrelmail works right out the tar ball with only a few configurations that needs to be changed. So basically all you need to do is unpack the thing put it somewhere nice and then link to it from where ever you want to access it and you’re done.
Right this should only take a few minutes.
Before we start grab the newest version from squirrelmail.org Download Squirrelmail
As of this writing the newest version of squirrelmail is squirrelmail-1.4.21.tar.gz when a never version arrives just replace squirrelmail-1.4.21.tar.gz with the new version throughout this document.
tar -zxvf squirrelmail-1.4.21.tar.gz
Next move squirrelmail to a propper location and rename it to something slightly easier to work with I will use squirrel as an example.
mv squirrelmail-1.4.21 /usr/local/www/squirrel
We need to set the right permissions on the “data” directory inside squirrelmail. It has to be the name of the webserver i.e. either www, apache or nobody whatever your webserver is called.
chown -R www /usr/local/www/squirrel/data
chgrp -R www /usr/local/www/squirrel/data
Next we need to modify the configuration files that came with squirrelmail.
perl /usr/local/www/squirrel/config/conf.pl
You will get a menu and we need to change a few things. The path to sendmail below assumes you run Qmail if not change the path accordingly.
In the menu press 2 “Server Settings” and replace example.com with your IP number.
In the menu press 3 “Sendmail Or Smtp” and then press 1 for Sendmail
In the menu press B “/usr/sbin/sendmail” then press 4 and change it to /var/qmail/bin/sendmail
Press “S” to save and then “Q” to quit squirrelmail is now configured and ready to run.
All you need to do now is link to the “squirrel” directory from where you want to access it.
Example
Let’s say you have a web page in /usr/local/www/foo/public_html and you want to be able to access squirrelmail from www.foo.com/webmail then all you have to do is create a link inside the foo directory that points to squirrel like shown below. This will give you access to squirrelmail from www.foo.com/webmail. For all others sites just repeat the step below
cd /usr/local/www/foo/public_html
ln -s /usr/local/www/squirrel webmail
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