mailcow

This page assumes that you have a an existing Alpine Linux node inside a virtual machine (not strictly necessary but a mail server should really run in its own VM).

Setup

1. Set up persistent storage for Docker:

   1. Format the device, e.g. in a VM with a host-managed LV: mkfs.ext4 -L docker /dev/vda

   2. Add the mount to /etc/fstab:

      /dev/vda    /var/lib/docker ext4    rw,relatime 0 2
      

   3. Create the mountpoint /var/lib/docker and mount the partition (just do mount -a)

2. Install Docker and Docker Compose (apk add docker docker-compose)

3. Enable and start Docker: rc-update add docker && rc-service docker start
4. Install bash, grep, sed, less, coreutils and curl
5. Clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized into /var/lib/docker

6. Run generate_config.sh and make the following modifications to mailcow.conf:

   • Add mail.netsoc.tcd.ie to ADDITIONAL_SERVER_NAMES
   • Disable LetsEncrypt certificates (SKIP_LETS_ENCRYPT=y)

7. Run docker-compose up -d to boot mailcow

8. Replace data/assets/ssl/cert.pem and data/assets/ssl/key.pem with the *.netsoc.tcd.ie certificate. Make sure to restart mailcow following this.

9. Add the following to data/conf/unbound/unbound.conf:

   forward-zone:
   name: "."
   forward-addr: 10.69.0.1
   

   Run docker-compose restart unbound-mailcow to restart Unbound when done.

Upgrading

mailcow provides an update script, see here for details.

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Last update: 2021-08-29