Part 2: Install Dovecot IMAP server on Ubuntu & Enable TLS Encryption

This is part 2 of building your own secure email server on Ubuntu from scratch tutorial series. In part 1, we showed you how to set up a basic Postfix SMTP server. In this tutorial, we are going to configure our email server so that we can receive and send emails using a desktop email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

To be able to send emails using a desktop email client, we need to enable the submission service in Postfix. To receive emails using a desktop email client, we can install an open-source IMAP server named Dovecot on the Ubuntu server. And to encrypt our communications, we need a TLS certificate.

Open Ports in Firewall

Ubuntu doesn’t enable firewall by default. If you have enabled the UFW firewall, then you need to run the following command to open email related ports in firewall.

sudo ufw allow 80,443,587,465,143,993/tcp

If you use POP3 to fetch emails (I personally don’t), then also open port 110 and 995.

sudo ufw allow 110,995/tcp

Securing Email Server Traffic with TLS Certificate

When we configure our desktop email clients, It’s always a good idea to enable TLS encryption to prevent hackers from snooping on our emails. We can easily obtain a free TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Issue the following commands to install Let’s Encrypt client (certbot) on Ubuntu server from the default software repository.

sudo apt update

sudo apt dist-upgrade

sudo apt install certbot

If you don’t have a web server running yet, I recommend you install one (Apache or Nginx), because it’s easier to obtain and install TLS certificate with a web server than using other methods. And in a later tutorial, I will show you how to set up webmail, which requires running a web server.

If you use Apache web server, you need to install the Apache plugin. (The following command will install Apache web server if it’s not already installed on your system.)

sudo apt install python3-certbot-apache

If you use Nginx web server, then install the Nginx plugin. (The following command will install Nginx web server if it’s not already installed on your system.)

sudo apt install python3-certbot-nginx

Obtaining TLS Certificate with Apache Web Server

You need to have an Apache virtual host for mail.your-domain.com before obtaining Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate. Create the virtual host file:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mail.your-domain.com.conf

Then paste the following text into the file.

<VirtualHost *:80>        
        ServerName mail.your-domain.com

        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file. Enable this virtual host.

sudo a2ensite mail.your-domain.com.conf

Then disable the default virtual host, because it might interfere with other virtual hosts.

sudo a2dissite 000-default

Reload Apache for the changes to take effect.

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Once the virtual host is created and enabled, run the following command to obtain Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate.

sudo certbot certonly -a apache --agree-tos --no-eff-email --staple-ocsp --email [email protected] -d mail.your-domain.com

Where:

  • -a apache: Use the Apache plugin for authentication
  • --agree-tos: Agree to terms of service.
  • --no-eff-email: Don’t receive emails from EFF foundation.
  • --staple-ocsp: Enables OCSP Stapling. A valid OCSP response is stapled to the certificate that the server offers during TLS.
  • --email: Enter your email address, which is used for important notifications and account recovery.
  • -d: domain, aka your mail server hostname.

Substitute the red text with your actual data. You should see the following which means the certificate is successfully obtained. You can also see the directory under which your cert is stored.

postfix-tls-letsencrypt-certbot

If there’s a problem when trying to obtain the TLS certificate, please read the following article to learn how to troubleshoot.

Obtaining TLS Certificate with Nginx Web Server

You need to have an Nginx virtual host for mail.your-domain.com before obtaining Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate. Create the virtual host file:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/mail.your-domain.com.conf

Next, paste the following text into the file.

server {
      listen 80;
      listen [::]:80;
      server_name mail.your-domain.com;

      root /usr/share/nginx/html/;

      location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge {
         allow all;
      }
}

Save and close the file. Make sure the /usr/share/nginx/html/ directory exists on your server.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/nginx/html/

Reload Nginx for the changes to take effect.

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Once the virtual host is created and enabled, run the following command to obtain Let’s Encrypt certificate with Nginx plugin.

sudo certbot certonly -a nginx --agree-tos --no-eff-email --staple-ocsp --email [email protected] -d mail.your-domain.com

Where:

  • -a nginx: Use the Nginx plugin for authentication
  • --agree-tos: Agree to terms of service.
  • --no-eff-email: Don’t receive emails from EFF foundation.
  • --staple-ocsp: Enables OCSP Stapling. A valid OCSP response is stapled to the certificate that the server offers during TLS.
  • --email: Enter your email address, which is used for important notifications and account recovery.
  • -d: domain, aka your mail server hostname.

You should see the following which means the certificate is successfully obtained. You can also see the directory under which your cert is stored.

dovecot-tls-letsencrypt-certbot

If there’s a problem when trying to obtain the TLS certificate, please read the following article to learn how to troubleshoot.

Enable Submission Service in Postfix

To send emails from a desktop email client, we need to enable the submission service of Postfix so that the email client can submit emails to Postfix SMTP server. Edit the master.cf file.

sudo nano /etc/postfix/master.cf

In submission section, uncomment or add the following lines. Please allow at least one whitespace (tab or spacebar) before -o.  In postfix configurations, a preceding whitespace character means that this line is continuation of the previous line. (By default the submission section is commented out. You can copy the following lines and paste them into the file, so you don’t have to manually uncomment or add new text.)

submission     inet     n    -    y    -    -    smtpd
  -o syslog_name=postfix/submission
  -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt
  -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=no
  -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
  -o smtpd_relay_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
  -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
  -o smtpd_sasl_type=dovecot
  -o smtpd_sasl_path=private/auth

The above configuration enables the submission daemon of Postfix and requires TLS encryption. So later on our desktop email client can connect to the submission daemon in TLS encryption. The submission daemon listens on TCP port 587. STARTTLS is used to encrypt communications between email client and the submission daemon.

Microsoft Outlook mail client only supports submission over port 465. If you are going to use Microsoft Outlook, then you also need to enable submission service on port 465 by adding the following lines in the file.

smtps     inet  n       -       y       -       -       smtpd
  -o syslog_name=postfix/smtps
  -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes
  -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
  -o smtpd_relay_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
  -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
  -o smtpd_sasl_type=dovecot
  -o smtpd_sasl_path=private/auth

Enable Submission Service in Postfix

Save and close the file.

Hint: The SMTP protocol is used when an email client submits emails to an SMTP server.

Next, we need to specify the location of TLS certificate and private key in Postfix configuration file. Edit main.cf file.

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

Edit the TLS parameter as follows. Remember to replace  mail.your-domain.com with your real hostname.

#Enable TLS Encryption when Postfix receives incoming emails
smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/fullchain.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/privkey.pem
smtpd_tls_security_level=may 
smtpd_tls_loglevel = 1
smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache

#Enable TLS Encryption when Postfix sends outgoing emails
smtp_tls_security_level = may
smtp_tls_loglevel = 1
smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache

#Enforce TLSv1.3 or TLSv1.2
smtpd_tls_mandatory_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtpd_tls_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtp_tls_mandatory_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtp_tls_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1

Your Let’s Encrypt certificate and private key are stored under /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/ directory.

postfix tls parameters

Save and close the file. Then restart Postfix.

sudo systemctl restart postfix

If you run the following command, you will see Postfix is now listening on port 587 and 465.

sudo ss -lnpt | grep master

postfix master submission port 587 smtps port 465

Installing Dovecot IMAP Server

Enter the following command to install Dovecot core package and the IMAP daemon package on Ubuntu server.

sudo apt install dovecot-core dovecot-imapd

If you use POP3 to fetch emails, then also install the dovecot-pop3d package.

sudo apt install dovecot-pop3d

Check Dovecot version:

dovecot --version

Sample output:

2.3.16 (7e2e900c1a)

Enabling IMAP/POP3 Protocol

Edit the main config file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

Add the following line to enable IMAP protocol.

protocols = imap

ubuntu dovecot enable IMAP protocol

If you use POP3 to fetch emails, then also add POP3 protocol.

protocols = imap pop3

Save and close the file.

Configuring Mailbox Location

By default, Postfix and Dovecot use mbox format to store emails. Each user’s emails are stored in a single file /var/mail/username. You can run the following command to find the mail spool directory.

postconf mail_spool_directory

Sample output:

mail_spool_directory = /var/mail

However, nowadays it’s almost always you want to use the Maildir format to store email messages. The config file for mailbox location is /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

The default configuration uses mbox mail format.

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

Change it to the following to make Dovecot use the Maildir format. Email messages will be stored under the Maildir directory under each user’s home directory.

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

We need to add the following line in the file. (On Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, this line is already in the file.)

mail_privileged_group = mail

Save and close the file. Then add dovecot to the mail group so that Dovecot can read the INBOX.

sudo adduser dovecot mail

Using Dovecot to Deliver Email to Message Store

Although we configured Dovecot to store emails in Maildir format, by default, Postfix uses its built-in local delivery agent (LDA) to move inbound emails to the message store (inbox, sent, trash, Junk, etc), and it will be saved in mbox format.

We need to configure Postfix to pass incoming emails to Dovecot, via the LMTP protocol, which is a simplified version of SMTP, so incoming emails will saved in Maildir format by Dovecot. LMTP allows for a highly scalable and reliable mail system. It also allows us to use the sieve plugin to filter inbound messages to different folders.

Install the Dovecot LMTP Server.

sudo apt install dovecot-lmtpd

Edit the Dovecot main configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

Add lmtp to the supported protocols.

protocols = imap lmtp

Save and close the file. Then edit the Dovecot 10-master.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

Change the lmtp service definition to the following.

service lmtp {
 unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp {
   mode = 0600
   user = postfix
   group = postfix
  }
}

dovecot lmtp ubuntu

Next, edit the Postfix main configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

Add the following lines at the end of the file. The first line tells Postfix to deliver incoming emails to local message store via the Dovecot LMTP server.  The second line disables SMTPUTF8 in Postfix, because Dovecot-LMTP doesn’t support this email extension.

mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp
smtputf8_enable = no

Save and close the file.

Configuring Authentication Mechanism

Edit the authentication config file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf

Uncomment the following line.

disable_plaintext_auth = yes

It will disable plaintext authentication when there’s no SSL/TLS encryption. Then find the following line,

#auth_username_format = %Lu

Uncomment it and change its value to %n.

auth_username_format = %n

By default, when Dovecot tries to find or deliver emails for a user, it uses the full email address. Since in this part, we only set up canonical mailbox users (using OS users as mailbox users), Dovecot can’t find the mailbox user in full domain format ([email protected]), so we need to set auth_username_format = %n to drop the domain part, then Dovecot should be able to find the mailbox user. This also allows us to use the full email address ([email protected]) to log in.

ubuntu dovecot auth_username_format

Next, find the following line.

auth_mechanisms = plain

This line only enables the PLAIN authentication mechanism. LOGIN is another authentication mechanism you probably want to add to support older email clients.

auth_mechanisms = plain login

Save and close the file.

Configuring SSL/TLS Encryption

Next, edit SSL/TLS config file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf

Change ssl = yes to ssl = required to enforce encryption.

ssl = required

Then find the following lines.

ssl_cert = </etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem
ssl_key = </etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.key

By default, Dovecot uses a self-signed TLS certificate. Replace them with the following values, which specify the location of your Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate and private key. Don’t leave out the < character. It’s necessary.

ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/fullchain.pem
ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/privkey.pem

Find the following line.

#ssl_prefer_server_ciphers = no

It’s a good practice to prefer the server’s order of ciphers over client’s. So uncomment this line and change the value to yes.

ssl_prefer_server_ciphers = yes

If you use Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04, disable insecure SSLv3, TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 by adding the following line.

ssl_min_protocol = TLSv1.2

If you are using Dovecot version 2.2.x (as in Ubuntu 18.04), you should add the following line to disable insecure TLS.

ssl_protocols = !SSLv3 !TLSv1 !TLSv1.1

Save and close the file.

Disable the FIPS Providers in OpenSSL on Ubuntu 22.04

Ubuntu 22.04 ships with OpenSSL 3.0, which features a FIPS provider. However, it won’t work with Dovecot. We need to diable the FIPS provider.

sudo nano /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf

Find the following line (line 54).

providers = provider_sect

Add a # character to comment it out.

#providers = provider_sect

Save and close the file.

If you don’t disable the FIPS provider in OpenSSL, Dovecot would produce the following error.

imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can't load SSL certificate: error:25066067:DSO support routines:dlfcn_load:could not load the shared library: filename(libproviders.so)

Configuring SASL Authentication

Edit the following file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

Change service auth section to the following so that Postfix can find the Dovecot authentication server. Please be careful about the syntax. Every opening bracket should be terminated by a closing bracket.

service auth {
    unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
      mode = 0660
      user = postfix
      group = postfix
    }
}

postfix smtp auth ubuntu

Save and close the file.

Auto-create Sent and Trash Folder

Edit the below config file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-mailboxes.conf

To auto-create a folder, simply add the following line in the mailbox section.

auto = create

Example:

 mailbox Trash {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Trash
 }

Some common folders you will want to create includes: Drafts, Junk, Trash and Sent. The Sent folder will be created under the user’s home directory when the user send the first email. The Trash folder will be created when the user deletes an email for the first time, etc. After you save and close all above config files, restart Postfix and Dovecot.

sudo systemctl restart postfix dovecot

Dovecot will be listening on port 143 (IMAP) and 993 (IMAPS), as can be seen with:

sudo ss -lnpt | grep dovecot

ubuntu-dovecot-imap-server-port-143-993

If there’s a configuration error, dovecot will fail to restart, so it’s a good idea to check if Dovecot is running with the following command.

systemctl status dovecot

Configure Desktop Email Client

Now open up your desktop email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Go to Edit -> Account Settings -> Account Actions -> Add Mail Account to add a mail account.

  • In the incoming server section, select IMAP protocol, enter mail.your-domain.com as the server name, choose port 143 and STARTTLS. Choose normal password as the authentication method.
  • In the outgoing section, select SMTP protocol, enter mail.your-domain.com as the server name, choose port 587 and STARTTLS. Choose normal password as the authentication method.

ubuntu postfix dovecot letsencrypt

Hint 1: You can also use port 993 with SSL/TLS encryption for IMAP, and use port 465 with SSL/TLS encryption for SMTP. You should NOT use port 25 as the SMTP port in mail clients to submit outgoing emails.

Hint 2: If you use Microsoft 365 Outlook email client, then you shouldn’t enable Secure Password Authentication (SPA), which is a proprietary Microsoft protocol. Your password is already encrypted by TLS.

You should now be able to connect to your own email server and also send and receive emails with your desktop email client!

We use local Unix accounts as email addresses, as we did in part 1. For example, if you have a user called user1 on your Ubuntu server, then you have an email address: [email protected], and the password for the email address is the same password for the user1 user. To create a local Unix account, run

sudo adduser user1

Note: Dovecot doesn’t allow you to log in with the root account. You need to create separate user accounts.

You can list all available mailbox users with:

sudo doveadm user '*'

It’s recommended to restart Dovecot after adding users, so Dovecot can recognize new mailbox users.

sudo systemctl restart dovecot

Troubleshooting Tips

As a rule of thumb, you should always check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) on your mail server when an error happens. The following is a list of specific errors and troubleshooting tips.

Can’t login from Mail Clients

If you can’t log into your mail server from a desktop mail client, scan your mail server to find if the ports (TCP 587, 465, 143, and 993) are open. Note that you should run the following command from another Linux computer or server. If you run it on your mail server, then the ports will always appear to be open.

sudo nmap mail.your-domain.com

And check if Dovecot is running.

systemctl status dovecot

You can also check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log), which may give you some clues. If Dovecot fails to start, the error might not be logged to the /var/log/mail.log file, you can run the following command to see what’s wrong.

sudo journalctl -eu dovecot

For example, some folks may have the following error in the journal.

doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf line 78: Unknown setting

Most of the time, it’s a simple syntax error, like a missing curly bracket. Open the configuration file, go to the specified line and fix the error.

If you find the following error message in the mail log

imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can't load DH parameters: error:1408518A:SSL routines:ssl3_ctx_ctrl:dh key too small

Then open the Dovecot TLS configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf

Add the following line in this file.

ssl_dh = </etc/dovecot/dh.pem

Save and close the file. Then generate the DH parameter file with:

sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/dovecot/dh.pem 4096

Restart Dovecot for the changes to take effect.

Cloudflare DNS

As I said in part 1, if you use Cloudflare DNS service, you should not enable the CDN (proxy) feature when creating DNS A record and AAAA record for the hostname of your mail server. Cloudflare doesn’t support SMTP or IMAP proxy.

Relay Access Denied

If you see the “relay access denied” error when trying to send emails from a mail client, it’s most likely that you use port 25 as the SMTP port in your mail client. As I said a while ago, you should use port 587 or 465 as the SMTP port in mail clients (Mozilla Thunberbird, Microsoft Outlook, etc) to submit outgoing emails. Port 25 should be used for SMTP server to SMTP server communications.

postfix dovecot relay access denied

If you see the following “relay access denied” error in the /var/log/mail.log file when trying to send emails from other mail services like Gmail to your own mail server, it’s likely that yourdomain.com is not in the list of $mydestination parameter.

NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-il1-f180.google.com[209.85.166.180]: 454 4.7.1 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-il1-f180.google.com>

You can display the current value of $mydestination with:

postconf mydestination

Some folks might not have the main domain name in the list like so:

mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost

Then run the following command to add the main domain name to the list.

sudo postconf -e "mydestination = yourdomain.com, \$myhostname, localhost.\$mydomain, localhost"

Reload Postfix for the changes to take effect.

sudo systemctl reload postfix

User Doesn’t Exist

If you see the following error message in the mail log (/var/log/mail.log), it’s likely that you forgot to set auth_username_format = %n In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf file.

mail postfix/lmtp[2256]: 68E00FC1A5: to=, relay=mail.example.com[private/dovecot-lmtp], delay=509, delays=509/0.03/0.03/0.02, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mail.example.com[private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550 5.1.1  User doesn't exist: [email protected] (in reply to RCPT TO command))

iOS Mail App

If you use the iOS Mail app to log into your mail server and encounter the following error.

ios the mail server is not responding

You can try to fix it by enforcing SSL encryption, for both SMTP and IMAP.

ios mail enforce SSL encryption

Fun fact: It seems the iOS Mail app has difficulty in supporting STARTTLS on IMAP port 143, but it supports STARTTLS on the submission port 587.

If you encounter the “No password provided” error in the iOS Mail app, it’s likely that you have a typo when entering the username in the Mail account settings, or you didn’t enable SSL in the Mail account settings.

ios mail no password provided

Unable to Receive Email From Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc

If you can’t receive emails from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, here are the possible causes:

  1. Your MX record is wrong, or not propagated to the Internet yet.
  2. Your mail server hostname doesn’t have DNS A record, or is not propagated to the Internet yet.
  3. Your firewall doesn’t allow incoming connections to port 25. Maybe your mail server is behind a NAT?
  4. Postfix isn’t listening on the public IP address.
  5. Check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) to find out if there are other errors in your Postfix and Dovecot configuration.

You can use the Network Tools Email Checker to test if your SMTP server is reachable from the Internet. Just enter your domain email address and click the Go button. As you can see from the screenshot below, it successfully found my domain’s MX record and my SMTP server is reachable from the Internet.

email checker

If your SMTP servers isn’t reachable from the Internet, then you have a problem in the first 4 items. If your SMTP server is reachable from the Internet, but you still can’t receive emails, check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) to find out if there is any errors in your Postfix and Dovecot configuration.

Auto-Renew TLS Certificate

You can create Cron job to automatically renew TLS certificate. Simply open root user’s crontab file.

sudo crontab -e

If you use Apache web server, add the following line at the bottom of the file.

@daily certbot renew --quiet && systemctl reload postfix dovecot apache2

If you are using Nginx web server, then add the following line.

@daily certbot renew --quiet && systemctl reload postfix dovecot nginx

Reloading Postfix, Dovecot and the web server is necessary to make these programs pick up the new certificate and private key.

Dovecot Automatic Restart

If for any reason your Dovecot process is killed, you need to run the following command to restart it.

sudo systemctl restart dovecot

Instead of manually typing this command, we can make Dovecot automatically restart by editing the dovecot.service systemd service unit. To override the default systemd service configuration, we create a separate directory.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/dovecot.service.d/

Then create a file under this directory.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/dovecot.service.d/restart.conf

Add the following lines in the file, which will make Dovecot automatically restart 5 seconds after a failure is detected.

[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s

Save and close the file. Then reload systemd for the changes to take effect.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

To check if this would work, kill Dovecot with:

sudo pkill dovecot

Then check Dovecot status. You will find Dovecot automatically restarted.

systemctl status dovecot

Next Step

I hope this article helped you set up Postfix and Dovecot on Ubuntu server. In part 3, I will show you how to create virtual mailboxes.

If you prefer to use MariaDB/MySQL database server, then follow this PostfixAdmin tutorial.

If you prefer to use PostgreSQL database server, then follow this PostfixAdmin tutorial.

As always, if you found this post useful, subscribe to our newsletter to get more tips and tricks. Take care 🙂

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319 Responses to “Part 2: Install Dovecot IMAP server on Ubuntu & Enable TLS Encryption

  • jubakala
    5 years ago

    Finally, a tutorial that tells everything that’s needed, not only parts of it. And finally, after about 12 hours of trying, I have a working email-server. So THANKS a lot!

    • I m looking for a reliable source which helps me to setup mail server (Ubuntu 19.10)
      This seems better I will try with this….

      Looking for suggestions from all friends
      Thanks

  • David
    5 years ago

    This is THE best postfix/dovecot tutorial on the web. Thank you very much for posting. You covered a lot of material in great detail, but there are still a few parts that I’m unclear on.

    When adding your mail account to your mail client, how do you know what the password is? We didn’t set a password for SMTP authentication in the walkthrough. If my Ubuntu user account is ‘admin’, and my email is [email protected], do I just use my local ‘admin’ account password to connect my mail client to my new email account?

    What if, in my specific case, my local Ubuntu login is ‘admin’, but I want the email address “[email protected]” to be the default for all incoming and outgoing mail? Do I need to create a “user1” local user account on Ubuntu? I’ve send some test emails from the “[email protected]” account and the SPF/DKIM checks are failing. DKIM only passes the check when I send mail from my “[email protected]” account.

    • David
      5 years ago

      Well, I continued working at it and I answered one of my questions. Yes, each email account has to have a local user account on the Ubuntu server in order to have email. I have successfully added my accounts on my Android email application. Still looking into the other issue about the “[email protected]” failing DKIM (and therefore getting detected as spam).

    • David
      5 years ago

      So after some research and trial/error since my last post, I’m still having problems with DKIM. When I email the port25.com test system from the user account that I followed this guide from, I get a pass on everything. When I email from another user on the system and get a report form port25.com, everything except DKIM passes.

      If I send mail from my root account, DKIM passes. I just can’t figure out what it is about this specific user account that’s causing it to fail. And of course, it happens to be the account that I primarily want to use to send and receive mail. Without DKIM passing, I’ve noticed that Google sends my messages straight to the spam box.

    • David
      5 years ago

      Aha! I figured out why my single user account was failing DKIM, and I understand why:

      DKIM takes the message content and hashes it with the private key, then puts this in the email header. I was using an additional postfix configuration option called smtp_generic_maps to “rewrite” how my sender address would appear in the recipients inbox. DKIM did not like this modification and that is what was causing the DKIM check to fail on messages from this specific user. Hopefully this helps somebody else!

      Simply comment out the smtp_generic_maps parameter in your /etc/postfix/main.cf file if you’re having this problem.

      Thanks again for the wonderful guide!

  • M Aprian
    5 years ago

    After doing this part, I can send email but cannot receive email. Can you help me? 🙁

    • M Aprian
      5 years ago

      SOLVED!! I made a little mistake, sorry

      This is the best guide for mail servers (for me now), THANKS YOU

      • I’ve got same hiccup: using email client I can send but cannot receive any email. I have followed exactly the steps in this tutorial. Would you share how you solve the problem? Thanks.

        • Don’t bother. Everything is fine now. Gmail was slow. Thanks.

  • Great tutorial, worked perfectly, thanks!

  • Daniel
    5 years ago

    Hello,

    In the command:
    sudo certbot –nginx –agree-tos –redirect –hsts –email your-email-address -d mail.your-domain.com

    What is the “your-email-address” I should provide ?

    Kind regards,
    Daniel

    • Xiao Guo-An (Admin)
      5 years ago

      Your email address 🙂 ([email protected]). It’s used to receive important notifications about your certificate.

  • Daniel
    5 years ago

    Hello,

    My domain is not a .com one, it is a .co.uk (let’s say test.co.uk)

    How should I replace “your-domain” in:
    “sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/mail.your-domain.com.conf” ?

    Kind regards,
    Daniel

    • Xiao Guo-An (Admin)
      5 years ago

      You can run this command.

      sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/mail.test.co.uk.conf
  • Daniel Orkan
    5 years ago

    Hello Xiao,

    Thank you very much for the guide, all works for me.
    Also, thank you for the support !!!

    Kind regards,
    Daniel Orkan

  • Once again. Well done. Got everything working perfectly. I couldn’t find the “buy me a beer” link, but thanks for a very thorough job. Have you done an article on virtual mailboxes yet?

  • melvin ramsey
    5 years ago

    I cannot thank you enough.
    Beautifully written article.

    • Xiao Guo An (Admin)
      5 years ago

      Glad to know it’s working for you 🙂

  • Biiiiig thank you, Xiao!!!

  • Dreyk
    5 years ago

    before “sudo certbot –apache –agree-tos –redirect –hsts –email your-email-address -d mail.your-domain.com”
    need to do “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”, cause some certbot python packages need to be upgraded. You got the error, while otbain certificates, if you dont upgrade some packages. Sorry for bad english.

  • Luke Taaffe
    5 years ago

    You absolute boss.

    I’ve rarely found a tutorial which just works.. for something so complicated and head spinning as well.
    Kudos mate, really.

  • I can’t seem to receive any external mail (ie: from gmail) – but everything else seems to be working well. Any thoughts?

    • found the solution – just needed to run this:

      sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 143 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
      • WRONG PORT LISTED ABOVE:

        sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 587 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
  • torvan
    4 years ago

    still 5 star rating! very precise and plain in language and logic writing!! Thank you very much!!!

  • Jason Reeves
    4 years ago

    Question – When opening the ports, why not just do ufw allow dovecot?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      First, there’s no “dovecot” UFW profile.

      linuxbabe@mail:~$ sudo ufw allow dovecot
      ERROR: Could not find a profile matching 'dovecot'

      The profiles installed by the dovecot package are “Dovecot IMAP” and “Dovecot Secure IMAP”, which correspond to port 143 and port 993 respectively. They allow mail clients to fetch emails from the mail server.

      But you also need to open port 587 and 465 for mail clients to submit emails. And if you use webmail, open port 80 and 443.

      You can run the following command to display available UFW profiles.

      sudo ufw app list

      Then you can use the command below to check which port a profile allows, like

      sudo ufw app info "Dovecot IMAP"

      Output

      Profile: Dovecot IMAP
      Title: Secure mail server (IMAP)
      Description: Dovecot is a mail server whose major goals are security and
      extreme
      reliability.
      
      Port:
        143/tcp
      
  • Pablo Cordero
    4 years ago

    Hi,
    This tutorial is really good but I have a little problem with SMTP. I have configured the server in Thunderbird and the IMAP works perfect, but when I’m going to send emails, it says me something like this “Your connection has expired with the SMTP server”.
    I can send messages with the

    mail

    command perfectly, so I don’t know where is the problem. If you know any solutions, please let me know it.

    Thank you in advance!

    • Pablo Cordero
      4 years ago

      Is now working, thanks for the tutorial!

  • Mårten Behm
    4 years ago

    Hi,
    My mail server works fine, as far as I know, after following your first three tutorials. Thank again! However, I don’t know how to make use of the letsencrypt setup. Can you provide some hint, or will you consider (maybe you already have?) writing a tutorial about this?

  • Nuno Miranda
    4 years ago

    It´s works when I try whith a gmail account, but when I try send a email to a icloud account, that´s not receiving… can you help me please?

  • Nuno Miranda
    4 years ago

    Hi, it´s me again,
    firstly thanks for your super complete tutorial, that´s help me a lot 😀

    the problem:
    I ´m in black list of icloud…..

    in mail.log i see this:
    … refused to talk to me: 550 5.7.0 Blocked…

    How can I solve this? help me :/

  • Nuno Miranda
    4 years ago

    Thanks for your support 😀 I´m gonna try that.

  • Constantinos
    4 years ago

    Superb tutorial and perfect in all aspects!
    I think I made a mistake when installing postfix and for system mail name I entered: mail.mydomain.com rather than mydomain.com and now the emails are @mail.mydomain.com rather @mydomain.com.
    Anything that can fix the issue?
    Thanks a lot

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Edit /etc/mailname file and change mail.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com. Then restart Postfix.

  • thanks BABE
    4 years ago

    Thanks for the guide!

    Trying to run the clean junk folders gives me an error. Any idea?

    ubuntu@mail:/home$ sudo doveadm expunge -A mailbox Trash all
    doveadm(nobody): Error: User initialization failed: Namespace ”: mkdir(/nonexistent/mail) failed: Permission denied (euid=65534(nobody) egid=65534(nogroup))
    doveadm(nobody): Error: User init failed

    ubuntu@mail:/home$ sudo doveadm user ‘*’
    nobody
    ubuntu

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      According to man doveadm-expunge, if the -A option is present, the command will be performed for all users, including the nobody user. Since the nobody user’s home directory is /nonexistent/, an error would occur because the nobody user can’t create the /nonexistent/ directory.

      You can ignore this error by redirecting the error to /dev/null. A better approach would be getting the user list from a file. You can list users with:

      sudo doveadm user '*'

      Then you can use sed to delete the line containing the word “nobody” and save the result into a text file.

       sudo doveadm user '*' | sed '/nobody/d' > userlist.txt

      Now we can use doveadm-expunge.

      sudo doveadm expunge -F userlist.txt mailbox Trash all

      Note that if you use virtual mailbox domain as described in part 3, there would be no such error, because the user list is obtained from MySQL/MariaDB database.

      • Linux BABE is AWESOME
        4 years ago

        Thank you so much for helping me understand!

  • First of all thank you for your documentation(s), it was really helpful for us!

    After all we have a little problem. We created a same virtual user like the unix user eg: [email protected], and unix user is user1. It feels like its mixing the SMTP auth or something.
    We can get the incoming emails, but we cannot send, because it’s asking SMTP pass, which perfectly fine. (We can login into roundcube.) Other virtual users works perfectly fine, but not the matching users.

    Setup was built on your flow, so we using lemp, postfix, dovecot, postfixadmin and roundcube.

    Could you give us tip where to start debugging our problem?
    Thank you in advance!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      I don’t think you can have a domain on Postfix that’s both a canonical domain (with Unix system account) and a virtual domain (with virtual users stored in MySQL/MariaDB database) at the same time.

      Domains listed in mydestination parameter are canonical domains. If a domain is listed in the virtual_mailbox_domains parameter, then you can not list the domain in mydestination parameter, as is described in Postfix documentation: NEVER list a virtual MAILBOX domain name as a mydestination domain!

      A virtual domain can’t have email addresses for Unix system accounts.

      • Thank you for your fast response.

        Now i understand much clearly. If mydestination is mail.mydomain.com and virtual_mailbox_domains is mydomain.com, then i can have [email protected] mailbox independently from my Unix system account which is user1.

        Could not be a problem to use the same “user” name, because the Unix system account will use the mydestination domain, right?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Yes. That’s correct.

      • Your help lead me to find out the problem.
        When we want to use indentical username eg: user1 for unix system account and for mailbox account, then we should define the full username ([email protected]) in the email client to incoming/outgoing username.
        Other virtual users can use simple username like presented on tutorial picture in document.
        Thanks for all✌😁

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      The username for Unix system account doesn’t have a domain name.

      The username for virtual domain user includes the domain part, as you can see by logging into MySQL/MariaDB database server and displaying the mailbox table in the postfixadmin database.

      I’m not sure if your finding is correct. I think the username field in Thunberbird is misleading.

  • Thanx for the guide!

    I can receive but I cannot send? Any clue what may cause it?

    From mail log:

    Feb  4 22:35:40 postfix/submission/smtpd[21672]: warning: database /etc/aliases.db is older than source file /etc/aliases
    Feb  4 22:35:40 postfix/submission/smtpd[21672]: fatal: in parameter smtpd_relay_restrictions or smtpd_recipient_restrictions, specify at least one working instance of: reject_unauth_destination, defer_unauth_destination, reject, defer, defer_if_permit or check_relay_domains
    Feb  4 22:35:41 postfix/master[21332]: warning: process /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/smtpd pid 21672 exit status 1
    Feb  4 22:35:41 postfix/master[21332]: warning: /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling

    As per this guide I have in my master.cf file:

     -o smtpd_relay_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated, reject
     -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject

    So do not have idea why this fatal error is there … or maybe it is not that?

    Any help would be apreciated …

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      There should be no space after the comma.

  • Hello there,

    At this stage I can received but when try to send it always says: Timeout when setting up SSL/TLS.

    The log file of the mail client shows:
    11:24:28 C: STARTTLS
    11:24:28 S: 454 4.7.0 TLS not available due to local problem
    11:24:28 Error: Unexpected return code 454 (expected 220):
    “4.7.0 TLS not available due to local problem”.
    11:24:28 Error code: 2001
    11:24:28 Failed action (0). Reset observed read/write timeouts: 8/8

    Can someone help with?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      It’s likely that you have made a typo or something in the Postfix configuration file.

  • Hello Xiao & Thank You so much,
    – You was right, I just redone the typing and it is now working but did not found where; I am now on way to part 3.
    – Also on getting the Letsencrypt certificates you must disable the default virtual host of apache2 – “sudo a2dissite *default” – before enable your own. Otherwise it will fail every time you try to get the certificates.

    Kindest Regards.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Disabling the default virtual host is not a must, if you have correctly configured the mail.yourdomain.com virtual host. I have obtained numerous TLS certificates without disabling the default virtual host.

  • Hello there,
    on “Obtaining TLS Certificate with Nginx Web Server” the syntax of

    ...
    location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge {
             allow all;
          }
    ...

    the “~” is followed by a SPACE or by the SLASH ?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      It’s a space. The ~ in Nginx is a regular expression. It’s not the Linux ~ (home directory).

  • In the file “/etc/nginx/conf.d/mail.your-domain.com.conf”,
    the line “root /var/www/mail.your-domain.com/;” move the nginx server from “Welcome to nginx!” to “403 Forbidden”,
    meaning when the line is comment with “#” the server answer with “Welcome to nginx!” and when the line is uncomment the server answer with “403 Forbidden”.

    Any clue why?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      This is not important in part 2. Follow my Roundcube tutorial to install a webmail client, then you will be able to login from webmail client at https://mail.your-domain.com.

  • Hello Xiao,

    I follow this ‘IT Security Guidelines for Transport Layer Security
    (TLS)’ from NCSC-NL, guideline B2-1 to B2-4 and table 2, 4, 6 and 7 (in
    English) witch is considered here one of the best guides to cyber
    security.
    The website is :
    [https://english.ncsc.nl/publications/publications/2019/juni/01/it-security-guidelines-for-transport-layer-security-tls]

    The test tool is : “internet.nl”

    About my installation they say on Ciphers (Algorithm selections) this:

    •••••••••••••••••••••••••
    Technical details:
    Mail server (MX): mail.digitalblueprint.eu.
    First found affected cipher: DHE-RSA-SEED-SHA
    Status: phase out
    •••••••••••••••••••••••••
    At least one of your mail servers supports one or more ciphers that have
    a phase out status, because they are known to be fragile and are at risk
    of becoming insufficiently secure.

    Is there any way to unused phased out Ciphers?


    Kindest Regards,
    Alex

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      You can add the following lines in Postfix main configuration file to improve the security of TLS connection.

      #Enforce high grade TLS ciphers
      smtpd_tls_ciphers = high
      smtpd_tls_mandatory_ciphers = high
      
      #Exclude non-secure ciphers
      smtpd_tls_mandatory_exclude_ciphers = MD5, DES, ADH, RC4, PSD, SRP, 3DES, eNULL, aNULL
      smtpd_tls_exclude_ciphers = MD5, DES, ADH, RC4, PSD, SRP, 3DES, eNULL, aNULL
      smtp_tls_mandatory_exclude_ciphers = MD5, DES, ADH, RC4, PSD, SRP, 3DES, eNULL, aNULL
      smtp_tls_exclude_ciphers = MD5, DES, ADH, RC4, PSD, SRP, 3DES, eNULL, aNULL
      
      #Disable client-initiated renegotiation to prevent DoS attacks inside a TLS connection
      tls_ssl_options = 0x40000000
      
      #Enable server cipher-suite preferences
      tls_preempt_cipherlist = yes
      

      However, don’t be obsessed with TLS for SMTP and IMAP servers. If you are too strict about TLS, then there will be SMTP clients that can’t establish TLS connection with your SMTP server.

  • Dejan Zivanov
    4 years ago

    Hi i am having currently problem with the setting up my account via Thunderbird for start. I went three times over all three tutorials but something is always not working, i think i am maybe wonky with my fingers or whatever. But here we go, third time is the charm. So, at the moment i am at this stage(2nd).

    And when i am trying to connect via Thunderbird, what password should i use?
    Because we never created that during first 2 tutorials.

    Should i use password that i am using to connect via terminal?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      The first two parts use local Unix accounts as email addresses. For example, if you have a user called dejan on your Ubuntu server, then you have an email address: [email protected], and the password for the email address is the same password for the dejan user.

      • Dejan Zivanov
        4 years ago

        Thank you, i managed to login via THunderbird, but at the moment i am getting this error(in var/logs) dovecot: imap(contact): Error: Failed to autocreate mailbox Trash: Permission denied

        Not sure what could be cause of this problem

  • david
    4 years ago

    please note that (at this date: 28/03/2020) in my machine: ubuntu 18.04.3 , the file: /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf had the ports commented out, this resulted in the ports being “closed” when scanned from the outside
    Other tan that, great job, I cant say wether all of this is needed to set it up in a “simple” way but anyway thanks 🙂

  • Quang Mai
    4 years ago

    Hi Xiao,

    I have another issues with the Thunderbird setup account:
    I checked all the Q&A above in the thread and I understand that the [email protected] as the UNIX root and password. Do you have any solutions? How do I create a second: [email protected] to check it? Thanks so much.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      To create another email address, simply create another Unix user account on your Ubuntu server.

      sudo adduser user2

      Part 3 will show you how to create virtual users.

  • Hello,

    Loving my setup… Thanks – I have followed all the way through (all 8ish parts).
    I have run into one Challenge post setup, and this is confusing me.
    Firstly… worth noting – Your setup is working!!!
    It is working for all devices apart from an OLD Samsung Tab 2 failed the setup.
    I have put this current challenge on this page as I think it could be the TLS SSL min protocols being part of the problem. But I don’t really want to tinker as I don’t know why you suggested these protocols. – Any suggestions as to what could be causing 1 old device to not work.
    The device also doesn’t allow STARTTLS , so tried every option and none worked.

    Also – feature request – PUSH messages, I would like to use this account for messages but the 15 mins or so i have to wait for IOS messages feels like an eternity . I have been searching and it appears you have to pay for Apple notification service? Feels bonkers!

  • neutek-narco
    4 years ago

    Thank you!

    I had to use this command to get past 404 errors with certbot

    certbot certonly –agree-tos –expand –authenticator webroot –installer apache -d mail.domain.org –webroot-path /var/www/mail.domain.org/

  • Ken Wright
    4 years ago

    Having a problem here. I’ve run the Postfix instructions in Part 2, but when I check systemctl status postfix it says postfix is “active (exited). Does this mean Postfix isn’t running? What have I done wrong?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      This is normal, because the Postfix systemd service is a oneshot service. Postfix will run the master process after the main Postfix exits. If you run the following command, you can verify if Postfix master process if running.

      sudo netstat -lnpt | grep master

      Output:

      tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:587             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1200577/master      
      tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:465             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1200577/master      
      tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1200577/master      
      tcp6       0      0 :::587                  :::*                    LISTEN      1200577/master      
      tcp6       0      0 :::465                  :::*                    LISTEN      1200577/master      
      tcp6       0      0 :::25                   :::*                    LISTEN      1200577/master    
      

      As you can see, the Postfix master process is listening on port 587, 465 and 25 on my mail server.

      The dovecot systemd service is a simple service, so you will see “active(running)” instead of “active(exited)”.

  • Ken Wright
    4 years ago

    That’s not what I get. I don’t see 587 or 465 listed when I run the above command. Any ideas?

  • Ken Wright
    4 years ago

    Found the problem! I had missed an underline character in /etc/postfix/main.cf. Once I fixed that and reloaded Postfix, everything fell into place.

  • Steinar
    4 years ago

    I have already postfix installed as a sendonly SMTP server using your other guide. I want to be able to also send from desktop client. Do I need to install dovecot to be able to communicate with Postfix? If so, are there other steps I can omit from this guide when I don’t need to receive email?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Why do you want to manually send emails from a desktop email client, but don’t want to receive reply email from the recipient?

      • Steinar
        4 years ago

        The reply goes to another email server (Gmail). I can’t send mail from that server.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      That’s not a good practice.

  • Steinar
    4 years ago

    Hmm really? So my wordpress server is sending out emails. Sometimes I need to write a custom email.
    Another server is taking care of incoming mail.
    Do you mean that you send only postfix server guide shouldn’t be combined with an external mail server for incoming and other email?
    I can also send mail from the other server, but not in this case (my colleague is in China, where gmail is blocked so can’t send out email).
    Thanks.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      I mean if you send an email from your own domain, but the reply email goes to a free third-party email service like gmail, that will trigger some spam filters. Why not receive reply emails on your own domain?

      • Steinar
        4 years ago

        I do receive emails to my own domains. GSuite (gmail) is setup for incoming mail to mydomain.com. The wordpress server is not connected to Gsuite and sending with Postfix. I though from your-send only Postfix guide that this was a ok setup?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Ok. I understand now. Simply follow the instructions in this article and you will be able to use desktop email client. Note that inet_interfaces should be set to all in the /etc/postfix/main.cf file.

  • Steinar
    4 years ago

    Thanks, so you mean I do need dovecot even when I will not receive mail?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Mozilla Thunderbird, and also other mail clients I think, will not allow you to log into your mail server or send emails if there’s no IMAP/POP3 server running.

  • Steinar
    4 years ago

    Ok, I see. I thought the separate settings in thunderbird etc for smtp server was connecting directly to postfix, but I guess that’s also dovecot than.

  • Victor Kulibaba
    4 years ago

    Hi Xiao, thank you for the awesome guide!
    I keep to fail at the last step (configuring Thunderbird). It always shows error box that IMAP server doesn’t allow choosen authentication method.
    I checked nmap for srv.kulibaba.site and it seems that all necessary ports are open.
    Also dovecot is running fine:

    ● dovecot.service - Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server
       Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dovecot.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
       Active: active (running) since Sun 2020-05-10 21:01:19 MSK; 1h 7min ago
         Docs: man:dovecot(1)
               http://wiki2.dovecot.org/
      Process: 15947 ExecStop=/usr/bin/doveadm stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
      Process: 16148 ExecReload=/usr/bin/doveadm reload (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
      Process: 15986 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dovecot (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
     Main PID: 15990 (dovecot)
       CGroup: /system.slice/dovecot.service
               ├─15990 /usr/sbin/dovecot
               ├─15993 dovecot/anvil
               └─16151 dovecot/log
    
    May 10 21:41:47 srv.kulibaba.site dovecot[16151]: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 0 s
    ecs): user=, rip=185.48.37.80, lip=194.58.119.56, TLS: SSL_read() failed: error:14094412:SSL rout
    ines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert bad certificate: SSL alert number 42, session=
    

    In the log part you can see the error I get.
    When I created let’s encrypt certificate for srv.kulibaba.site I also added –must-staple option, that’s probably the only thing I did “against” your guide…
    I also tried to tweak Thunderbird changing general.useragent.compatMode.firefox to True, though it didn’t help. Neither choosing oAuth2 as auth method helped. My next concern is ssl = required in 10-ssl.conf, but at this point I decided to refer to the source, making this comment.
    Btw, initially if my hostname and MX record is srv.kulibaba.site, was it right to create virtual nginx host and issue certificate using this name instead of “mail.kulibaba.site”?

    • Victor Kulibaba
      4 years ago

      Seems like I managed to resolve the issue by setting:
      security.ssl.enable_ocsp_must_staple = false
      in Thunderbird config editor

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Postfix and Dovecot don’t support OCSP stapling. If you add --must-staple to your TLS certificate, then mail clients (Thunderbird) would refuse to connect. I didn’t test it, but other SMTP servers are probably not able to establish secure TLS connection with your Postfix SMTP server.

      So I recommend obtaining a new TLS certificate for your hostname (srv.kulibaba.site) without using --must-staple.

      • On ubuntu 20.04LTS “ssl_min_protocol = TLSv1.3” is not supported and we need to upgrade to at least dovecot 2.8

        Can you help with ?

        • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
          3 years ago

          The latest stable version of Dovecot is 2.3.

          Don’t be obsessed with using the latest cutting-edge TLS settings. That’s why you get TLS errors in your mail log. TLSv1.2 is secure enough.

  • Victor Kulibaba
    4 years ago

    Hi Xiao, at the beginning of the guide you wrote: “You need to have an Nginx virtual host for mail.your-domain.com before obtaining Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate”.

    This is probably not true, I just need the certificate and see no reason in creating root folder and granting access to www-data. So I used certbot “certonly” option and configured nginx to make MX url forbidden (return 403). It seems to work fine. Do you see any problem with that?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      Creating a virtual host is not a must if you have a default Nginx virtual host. There’s no problem with your method. However, you need to create a dedicated Nginx virtual host if you want to install Roundcube webmail later.

      • On Obtaining TLS Certificate with Nginx Web Server for ubuntu 20.04LTS I get the following error:

        “AttributeError: module ‘acme.challenges’ has no attribute ‘TLSSNI01′”

        Any clue on how to resolve this?

        • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
          4 years ago

          If you see the following error while trying to obtain TLS certificate on Ubuntu 20.04

          module 'acme.challenges' has no attribute 'TLSSNI01'

          You need to edit a config file.

          sudo nano /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/configurator.py

          Change

          return [challenges.HTTP01, challenges.TLSSNI01]

          to:

          return [challenges.HTTP01]

          Save and close the file. Then run the certbot command again to obtain TLS certificate.

  • Laurentiu
    4 years ago

    Hello Xiao,

    thank you for your very good tutorial. I successfully installed an email server using it. All good, but one point.

    We have an ERP application which should send emails, but I cannot connect it to my email server. Not sure if I a missing some options of if I am inputing somethin wrong.

    So I have:
    outgoing mail server: mail.mydomain.com
    port: 25
    encryption: TLS

    error: could not connect to SMTP host.
    I tested with SMTP authentication (just took one created email address, not sure if I need another SMTP account..), I also tried without authentication.

    Can you please give some insight?

    Thank you!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      You should use port 587.

      • Laurentiu
        4 years ago

        Tahnk you.
        Using port 587 I am a step closer. Same error if trying to connect to mail.domain.com but working if connecting to internal server IP.
        Tested without SMTP auth (this is correct)?
        New error on test email:

        Mailer Error: Language string failed to load: tls The following From address failed: [email protected] Called Mail() without being connected

        Can you please help with this error?

        Thank you!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      4 years ago

      You should enable SMTP auth (enter an email address and password) on port 587.

  • Veelst
    4 years ago

    really very nice and awesome tut! thanks for ur work

    im trying to install mailserver for only local use, i have my own local dns server (bind9) and have mx record and stuff for my mail server, obv i cant use Let’s Encrypt, so im using openssl instead, followed to this part, i think everything’s fine

    i can login using thunderbird in my laptop fine, it auto detect my settings, i try to send test email to myself (or another local account), i see the mail in sent folders but i receive nothing in inbox.

    i see this in the /var/log/mail.log

    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/submission/smtpd[2723]: connect from unknown[192.168.7.17]
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/submission/smtpd[2723]: Anonymous TLS connection established from unknown[192.168.7.17]: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (128/128 bits)
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/submission/smtpd[2723]: CC429802AE: client=unknown[192.168.7.17], sasl_method=PLAIN, sasl_username=veelst
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/cleanup[2728]: CC429802AE: message-id=
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/qmgr[2556]: CC429802AE: from=, size=576, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/submission/smtpd[2723]: disconnect from unknown[192.168.7.17] ehlo=2 starttls=1 auth=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=8
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/smtp[2729]: CC429802AE: to=, relay=none, delay=0.07, delays=0.06/0.01/0/0, dsn=5.4.6, status=bounced (mail for tsun.net loops back to myself)
    May 23 12:58:34 tsun postfix/cleanup[2728]: EBED4802C6: message-id=
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun postfix/bounce[2730]: CC429802AE: sender non-delivery notification: EBED4802C6
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun postfix/qmgr[2556]: EBED4802C6: from=, size=2417, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun postfix/qmgr[2556]: CC429802AE: removed
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun dovecot: imap(veelst): Logged out in=544 out=708 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=0 body_bytes=0
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun postfix/smtp[2729]: EBED4802C6: to=, relay=none, delay=0.04, delays=0.04/0/0/0, dsn=5.4.6, status=bounced (mail for tsun.net loops back to myself)
    May 23 12:58:35 tsun postfix/qmgr[2556]: EBED4802C6: removed

    i dont know where im going wrong, help is much appreciated!
    thanks!

    • Veelst
      4 years ago

      for some reasons i see the reply is posted “4 seconds ago” and it been days lol
      anyway, solved my problem thanks!

  • Mysterion
    3 years ago

    Hi, thanks for the great tutorial!

    What if Postfix and dovecot are running on separate servers like smtp.example.com and imap.example.com? How to configure LMTP?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Edit the Dovecot 10-master.conf file.

      sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

      When Postfix and Dovecot are running on separte servers, you need to make LMTP service listen on TCP socket. Change the lmtp service definition to the following.

      service lmtp {
      
       unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp {
         mode = 0600
         user = postfix
         group = postfix
        }
      
        inet_listener lmtp {
          address = 10.10.10.2
          port = 2424
        }
      
      }
      

      LMTP should be used in a local LAN and not be visible to the Internet, so you should use a private IP address for the inet_listener. Replace 10.10.10.2 with your own private IP address. If your SMTP server and IMAP server are not in the same LAN, you can use wireguard to create a virtual private network.

      Save and close the file. Then restart Dovecot.

      sudo systemctl restart dovecot

      Next, edit the Postfix main configuration file on the other server.

      sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

      Add the following lines at the end of the file. The first line tells Postfix to deliver emails to local message store via the dovecot LMTP server listening on 10.10.10.2:2424. The second line disables SMTPUTF8 in Postfix, because Dovecot-LMTP doesn’t support this email extension.

      mailbox_transport = lmtp:inet:10.10.10.2:2424
      smtputf8_enable = no
      

      Save and close the file. restart Postfix.

      sudo systemctl restart postfix
  • ivan006
    3 years ago

    outbox/drafts etc not creating automatically:

    When i set the 15-mailboxes.conf to create boxes automatically, then create a user with “sudo adduser user1” and then add it to thunder bird thunderbird only contains the inbox and nothing else (which confuses it when it tries to save sent mails to outbox etc)

    “`

    mailbox Junk {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Junk
    }
    mailbox Trash {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Trash
    }

    # For \Sent mailboxes there are two widely used names. We’ll mark both of
    # them as \Sent. User typically deletes one of them if duplicates are created.
    mailbox Sent {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Sent
    }
    mailbox “Sent Messages” {
    special_use = \Sent
    }
    “`

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      The “Sent” folder will be automatically created when you send the first email. The “Trash” folder will be automatically created when you delete an email, etc.

  • Huge thanks for creating and maintaining this guide!

    Everything is working happily for me… except the Microsoft Mail App (on Windows 10) which, no mater what I’ve tried, proclaims “Untrusted certificate”.

    The cert is configured in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf
    Another client I’ve tried (GMail on Android) doesn’t complain about the cert.
    I’ve configured the MS Mail App to use mail. names for the incoming and outgoing servers and used the suggested ports of 143 and 587 (which default to imap.:993 for incoming and smtpauths.:25 for outgoing)
    I almost wonder if despite the settings it’s still expecting to see imap. and smtpauths. listed in the cert or some other stupidity… it really gives me no detailed error information to go on.
    I’ve sworn at it repeatedly and cursed windows 10 many times

    I can ignore the “untrusted certificate” warning and everything appears happy – of course then once the cert gets renewed the windows mail app just silently stops syncing because the force-accepted cert no longer matches the retrieved cert and i have to remove the account(s), re-add them, and ignore the untrusted cert issue again because MS.

    At this point I don’t think the problem is on the linux postfix/dovecot side, HOWEVER, I did experience my gmail client silently stop syncing too – until today when i was fiddling with my linux configs again when the gmail app suddenly started syncing my mail again.

    If I can’t get this figured out I guess I’ll have to setup a daily cron to flick an email at me as a canary and go through the remove/re-add account process when the daily mails stop due to the cert being refreshed… I’d really like to solve this problem correctly though and have confidence that I’m not missing important mails.

    Thanks again! Sorry for getting long winded here.

  • Thank you so very much!

    This is by far the most helpful tutorial about anything that I have ever read, for so many reasons.

    Cheers!

  • Akarshit Waal
    3 years ago

    Hey! Great article. I have one doubt. I have a client send me a mail on port 25(which I cannot change). After following the first part, the client was able to send the mail on 25 and I was able to receive it.
    After the 2nd part postfix was not listening to port 25.
    I found out that `smtp inet n – y – 1 postscreen` line was commented in master.cf. I uncommented it and now I see it listening to port 25, but when the client tried to send a mail, he get’s no response and the request is just pending. Any idea what could be missing?

  • ivan006
    3 years ago

    Where does postfix (or dovecot) even store these emails please?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If you are using virtual mailbox (PostfixAdmin), the emails are stored in /var/vmail/yourdomain.com/username.
      If you are not using virtual mailbox, the emails are stored under ~/Maildir (The Maildir subdirectory under each user’s home directory.)

      • ivan006
        3 years ago

        Much appreciated

        • ivan006
          3 years ago

          im not using virtual mailbox. Is it “/root/Maildir/new”? “/root/Maildir” has no other loose files and its other subdirectories ae empty. Anyway if it is “/root/Maildir/new” I see there are files in there but nothing after the 13 (this month) but i have sent many emails why is this? how is this even working?

        • ivan006
          3 years ago

          oh i see its in
          /home/plefort/Maildir

    • ivan006
      3 years ago

      One more question. When i add my custom email account to gmail it doesnt save my sent emails to the sent folder. any thoughts?

      • ivan006
        3 years ago

        is it because its using pop conventions, and so doesnt care about server storage, and so wont save anything to the server?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      I’m not sure what you mean by “add my custom email account to gmail”.

  • Insignia
    3 years ago

    Hello,

    First, thank you for the detailed tutorial on setting up an email server with Ubuntu!
    I’ve also followed the RoundCube tutorial (And the Postfix tutorial)from you and setup everything properly, but there seems to be an obstacle that prevents me from using Roundcube.

    Logging in to Roundcube works perfectly fine, but sending and receiving emails cannot be done.
    When using my email to test the server, I get a “Mail Undeliverable” message with the following error:

    :host
    mail.domain.com [private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550 5.1.1
     user does not exist:
    [email protected] (in Reply to RCPT TO command)

    So the mail server cannot receive email.

    Sending email using the Roundcube does nothing. After I compose a test email and click send, Roundcube would keep loading with no progress until I get an error that says “Request timed out”

    What can I do to resolve this? Any leads would be appreciated, thank you!

    • Insignia
      3 years ago

      Looks like some information was omitted for some reason, here is the actual error message I get from trying to send an email to my mail server:

      ([email protected]):host
      mail.domain.com [private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550 5.1.1
      ([email protected]) user does not exist:
      [email protected] (in Reply to RCPT TO command)
  • Insignia
    3 years ago

    Okay so now I can receive emails in the server. There is a minor change that I need to do in

    etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf

    I had to modify this line to include %Ln

    auth_username_format = %Ln

    This fixed the issue of not being able to receive emails in the mail server. But the problem of sending emails still persists. The Roundcube just loads indefinitely until the request timed out.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If you encounter errors with Roundcube, you can check the error logs at /var/log/apache2/roundcube_error.log (if you are using Apache), or /var/log/nginx/roundcube.error (if you are using Nginx.)

      • Insignia
        3 years ago

        Thank you for this guide! It’s been very thorough and helpful

    • Insignia
      3 years ago

      Nevermind, the issue has been resolved. I checked /var/log/mail.log and found out where the issue is. There was a typo (my bad lol) in master.cf file. After I fixed that one typo, and restarted the service, Roundcube can send and receive emails without problem.

  • Hironori
    3 years ago

    Hi, Xiao. Thank you for helpful tutorials so much!! And I can’t send & recieve mail until this stage. mail.log says
    mail postfix/lmtp[3305]:: to=, relay=mail.example.com[private/dovecot-lmtp], delay=0.14, delays=0.09/0.01/0.02/0.02, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mail.example.com[private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550 5.1.1 User doesn’t exist: [email protected] (in reply to RCPT TO command))
    Any ideas? thanks

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Perhaps your email address is in lower case, but you used upper case when you send the email. You can edit the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf file and change the auth_username_format to

      auth_username_format = %Ln

      So dovecot would lowercase the username. Restart Dovecot.

      sudo systemctl restart dovecot
      • Hello there,

        After installing Dovecot on ubuntu 20.04LTS i found out that dovecot 2.3.7.2 does not work with SSL1.3. So I need to update Dovecot to at least the version 2.3.8 or to the stable version 2.4

        Can you help with?

        • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
          3 years ago

          The latest stable version of Dovecot is 2.3.

          Don’t be obsessed with using the latest cutting-edge TLS settings. That’s why you get TLS errors in your mail log. TLSv1.2 is secure enough.

  • I concur this is an AMAZING write-up, thank you. I have several gsuite accounts and am trying to migrate one over to my local MX. Like a few others, I’ve completed the setup, triple checked your instructions, confirmed that there are no postfix or dovecot errors, yet can only send messages, but not receive any. Now, if I send a message from the domain I migrated, [email protected] to [email protected] it appears in my inbox. If I send from [email protected] to [email protected] – it also WORKS, but if I send from [email protected] to [email protected] the message never arrives in my Inbox. (18.04, Dovecot v. 2.3.10.1)
    Thank you.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If there are no errors in mail log (/var/log/mail.log) after sending emails from gmail to your domain address. It could be:

      1.) Your MX record is wrong, or the MX hostname doesn’t have an IP address.

      2.) Port 25 (inbound) is closed.

      • Awesome. Port 25 was the issue; I’m 100%. I appreciate the article and the prompt response.

  • Hello there,

    my mail log have a lot of this

    SSL_accept error from st43p00im-ztfb10063301.me.com[17.58.63.179]: -1
    Jul 7 16:44:01 www postfix/smtpd[66273]: warning: TLS library problem: error:14209102:SSL routines:tls_early_post_process_client_hello:unsupported protocol:../ssl/statem/statem_srvr.c:1685

    What can be this? On their side or on my side?

    Thank You

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Don’t be obsessed with using the latest cutting-edge TLS settings. That’s why you get TLS errors in your mail log.

  • One other thing, I saw this message in mail.log:
    ‘mail dovecot: config: Warning: please set ssl_dh= /etc/dovecot/dh.pem’
    After executing the suggested command, I didn’t see that message again…
    HTH and thanks for your work on this how-to 🙂

  • Last suggestion: I always found it complicated and error-prone to get a Letsencrypt certificate via the method you recommend (which is the method commonly adopted in how-to’s on the Web). Instead, I prefer to stop the Web server and use the following command, which works without hassle every time:

    certbot certonly –standalone –preferred-challenges http -d example.com -d www.example.com

    (obviously, you have to replace ‘example.com’ with your own domain.) Then I respond to the prompts for a mail address and permission to be contacted by EFF and restart the Web server. I prefer to do certificate renewals in the same way…

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      You have to stop your web server again when you renew TLS certificate. (every 90 days)

      If it’s not working, you have done something wrong. If you paste the error message when obtaining TLS certificate, perhaps I can help.

      • I have my certificates, and they’re working fine… I think you missed the point of what I was saying… 😉
        Personally, I find that ‘certbot certonly –standalone’ with the Web server temporarily shut down is a lot less hassle than being obliged to set up the vhosts first and satisfy all the constraints of using the nginx/apache2 plugins…

  • Pawel
    3 years ago

    after running sudo netstat -lntp | dovecot I am getting the following error message:
    doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf line 14: ssl_cert: Can’t open file /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.lobap.ca/fullchain.pem: Permission denied
    Any suggestion on how to fix it, please.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      The correct command is

      sudo netstat -lnpt | grep dovecot
  • Hi, hope to save me. Everything is perfect until this command UbuntuServer 20.04.
    “sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot”

    E: The repository ‘http://ppa.launchpad.net/certbot/certbot/ubuntu focal Release’ does not have a Release file.
    N: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
    N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

    I can´t install TLS Certificate. the port 443 does not open “attach picture”
    I opened the ports by firewall UFW and I call my isp and all port are open. can you help me?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Certbot doesn’t have a PPA for Ubuntu 20.04. Remove it with:

      sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:certbot/certbot

      Install certbot from the default software repository.

      sudo apt update
      sudo apt install certbot
  • Alex Xia
    3 years ago

    Hello Guo an,
    When I send an email to my gmail account, there is a red lock on gmail which means that my email is not encrypted. However, my TLS letsencrypt connection is working so I don’t know what the problem is. How do I get rid of the red lock?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Maybe you forgot to add the following lines in /etc/postfix/main.cf file?

      smtp_tls_security_level = may
      smtp_tls_loglevel = 1
      smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache
      
      • Alex Xia
        3 years ago

        Found the problem!
        It turns out that my postfix had enabled a PIX workaround “disable esmtp” which for some reason downgraded the connection to a HELO connection to Google.
        I had the following line in my mail.log file:

         enabling PIX workarounds: disable_esmtp delay_dotcrlf for gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 

        This problem was fixed when I added the following line in my main.cf file:

         smtp_pix_workarounds = delay_dotcrlf 
  • Sherratt
    3 years ago

    Absolutely great guide. Life-saver!

  • IMRON HS
    3 years ago

    When I try this step:

    sudo certbot --nginx --agree-tos --redirect --hsts --staple-ocsp --email [email protected] -d mail.your-domain.com
    

    I got error message like attach file, can you help me Xiao?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Add DNS A record for email.vanhussen.net

  • Robert Herzog
    3 years ago

    My Ubuntu 20.04 did not allow incoming traffic, while I explicitly have given ufw allow 25
    In postfix main.cf file, I changed inet_interfaces from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0
    If I understand well, the postfix installation that preexisted on my rented server was looking only at localserver for email. Probably kind of a countermeasure to prevent newly installed servers from accepting-relaying smap if postfix is not properly configured…
    Robert

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf file and change the value of inet_interfaces to all.

      inet_interfaces = all

      Then restart Postfix.

  • Herzog Albert
    3 years ago

    Thanks ! This is indeed what I tried and it cured the issue.
    Robert

  • Joseph
    3 years ago

    I keep getting the following error when trying to obtain a TLS certificate. I definitely have an A record on my godaddy domain page that leads to the server IP address. Is there anything else that could be causing this?

       Domain: mail.domainname.online
       Type:   None
       Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for
       mail.josephngechu.online - check that a DNS record exists for this
       domain
    
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      I can’t find the A record for mail.josephngechu.online. https://dnsmap.io/#A/mail.josephngechu.online

    • Hector Garcia
      3 years ago

      Hello,

      Great guide. I’m getting this error when installing the certbot certificate:

       - The following errors were reported by the server:
      
         Domain: mail.lunitacrafts.com
         Type:   None
         Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for
         mail.lunitacrafts.com - check that a DNS record exists for this
         domain
       - Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot
         configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
         secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
         also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so
         making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
      

      It didn’t show up on dnsmap.io so i contacted namecheap and they told me (for the A and AAAA records) to get rid of the domain in the host field so to only have it as “mail”. It showed up on dnsmap.io but then i got this error:

       - The following errors were reported by the server:
      
         Domain: mail.lunitacrafts.com
         Type:   unauthorized
         Detail: Invalid response from
         http://mail.lunitacrafts.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/IRyYyYc_boEZJ7CPXEdRJQPHB7LoipSFbqzO30jt_dQ
         [2607:5501:3000:1141::2]: "\n\n404 Not
         Found\n\n

      Not Found

      \n<p" To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain contain(s) the right IP address.

      Your help fixing this would be much appreciated.

      • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
        3 years ago

        Can’t find your A or AAAA record on dnsmap.io.

        • Hector Garcia
          3 years ago

          Sorry i left it with the broken records to see the error message. It now gives me this error message when i run the certbot certificate. I checked the IPv4 and v6 I entered and they’re correct.

          Domain: mail.lunitacrafts.com
          Type: unauthorized
          Detail: Invalid response from
          http://mail.lunitacrafts.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/MNUHdMy9MMeKL8fe5KOEecoCDaLkUFDJMV_lESlhckc
          [2607:5501:3000:1141::2]: “\n\n404 Not<br /> Found\n\n

          Not Found

          \n<p"

          To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
          entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
          contain(s) the right IP address.

      • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
        3 years ago

        It seems a firewall is blocking http/https requests to your mail server.

        You need to open the following TCP ports on your mail server.

        25,80,443,587,465,143,993
  • Robert J
    3 years ago

    Hello. I am having issues with getting incoming mail working. I keep getting the error below when a mail server tries to connect to me:

    Sep  2 21:03:45 lucy postfix/smtpd[308599]: warning: SASL: Connect to /var/spool/postfix/private/auth failed: No such file or directory
    Sep  2 21:03:45 lucy postfix/smtpd[308599]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms

    The file definitely exists with what look like the correct permissions:

    root@lucy:/etc/dovecot# ls -la /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
    srw-rw---- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  2 21:03 /var/spool/postfix/private/auth

    And here is my config excerpt from dovecot’s 10-master.conf:

    service auth {                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    # Postfix smtp-auth                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
        mode = 0660                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   user = postfix                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                group = postfix                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             }                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     } 

    I am at a loss to what the problem could be. I am using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      It looks like you changed the submission service in the /etc/postfix/master.cf file.

      Also, you can check if Dovecot is running.

      sudo systemctl status dovecot

      If it’s not running, check the journal to find out why it’s not running.

      sudo journalctl -eu dovecot

      The /var/log/mail.log file might also tell you why Dovecot failed.

  • Thomas
    3 years ago

    Besides configuring dovecot’s mailbox, postfix also needs to be configured; which is missing in this tutorial:

    sudo postconf -e “home_mailbox = Maildir/”

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Unless you didn’t configure LMTP as told in this article.

      The home_mailbox parameter is used by Postifx’s local delivery agent. After configuring LMTP, Postfix will not use its own local delivery agent, but pass incoming emails to Dovecot via LMTP protocol, which is effected by the following setting. Postfix doesn’t care which mailbox format you are going to use.

      mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp
      • Thomas
        3 years ago

        Yes, thanks for the hint. I did miss the service lmtp configuration part. Thus, I ultimately ran into another issue, I just was able to solve. (dovecot-lmtp: No such file or directory) Thanks for the lesson! Your tutorial is great and our Email-SRV is up and running flawlessly. (A bit slow, but at least it works for now)

  • Hi Xiao,
    I attempted to redo the setup from the start and I’m now stuck – after configuring thunderbird and trying to send an email – I’m getting the following error :

    Sending of the message failed.
    An error occurred while sending mail: Unable to establish a secure link with Outgoing server (SMTP) mail.thevadasan.com using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature. Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

    I’m assuming it is listening on port 587:

    pt@mail:~$ sudo netstat -lnpt | grep master
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:587             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1292/nginx: master  
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:465             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1292/nginx: master  
    tcp6       0      0 :::587                  :::*                    LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      1292/nginx: master  
    tcp6       0      0 :::465                  :::*                    LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp6       0      0 :::25                   :::*                    LISTEN      15523/master        
    tcp6       0      0 :::443                  :::*                    LISTEN      1292/nginx: master  
    
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Your submission service on port 587 advertises STARTTLS. Always check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) when something went wrong.

      • I’m getting some errors on the RSA keys, from the priv.key – i’ve checked that the file exists. I’m not sure how to interpret this –

        
        Sep 13 14:14:16 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: warning: cannot get RSA private key from file "/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.thev>
        Sep 13 14:14:16 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: warning: TLS library problem: error:02001002:system library:fopen:No such file>
        Sep 13 14:14:16 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: warning: TLS library problem: error:20074002:BIO routines:file_ctrl:system lib>
        Sep 13 14:14:16 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: warning: TLS library problem: error:140B0002:SSL routines:SSL_CTX_use_PrivateK>
        Sep 13 14:14:20 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: warning: hostname client-2a0d-7c40-3000-b8b--3.hostwindsdns.com does not resol>
        Sep 13 14:14:20 mail postfix/submission/smtpd[9866]: connect from unknown[2a0d:7c40:3000:b8b::3]
        
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      It seems you didn’t correctly enter the path for your TLS private key in /etc/postfix/main.cf file. The path is not complete.

      /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.thev
      • yes, you’re correct there was an error with the path. I had a typo on privkey.pem

  • Danny
    3 years ago

    Thanks you for the excellent guide!

    I’ve been successful with creating the relay according to your relevant guide (sent confirmed it using the “mail [email protected]”). I’ve also been successful in connecting via IMAP from a mail client (Mac Mail client).

    However, when trying to use the SMTP via Mac Mail client, I’m unsuccessful. Why could this be?

    Thank you so much, and please accept my small donation 🙂

    Here are a failed log (from Mail client) and a success log (from mail “[email protected]” command):

    Sep 23 05:30:04 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: connect from unknown[my.client.ip.address]
    Sep 23 05:30:05 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: Anonymous TLS connection established from unknown[my.client.ip.address]: TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
    Sep 23 05:30:06 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[my.client.ip.address]: 454 4.7.1 : Relay access denied; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    Sep 23 05:30:06 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: disconnect from unknown[my.client.ip.address] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 quit=1 commands=5/6
    Sep 23 05:30:24 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: connect from unknown[my.client.ip.address]
    Sep 23 05:30:24 mail dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=my.client.ip.address, lip=10.128.0.3, mpid=92237, TLS, session=
    Sep 23 05:30:25 mail dovecot: imap([email protected]): Logged out in=32 out=515 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=0 body_bytes=0
    Sep 23 05:30:25 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: Anonymous TLS connection established from unknown[my.client.ip.address]: TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
    Sep 23 05:30:25 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: disconnect from unknown[my.client.ip.address] ehlo=2 starttls=1 quit=1 commands=4
    Sep 23 05:30:29 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: connect from unknown[my.client.ip.address]
    Sep 23 05:30:30 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: Anonymous TLS connection established from unknown[my.client.ip.address]: TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
    Sep 23 05:30:31 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[my.client.ip.address]: 454 4.7.1 : Relay access denied; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    Sep 23 05:30:31 mail postfix/smtpd[92233]: disconnect from unknown[my.client.ip.address] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 quit=1 commands=5/6
    ...
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/pickup[92192]: 17C5313E9D6: uid=1002 from=
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/cleanup[92282]: 17C5313E9D6: message-id=
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/qmgr[92193]: 17C5313E9D6: from=, size=421, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/smtp[92284]: Untrusted TLS connection established to smtp.sendgrid.net[167.89.123.53]:587: TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/smtp[92284]: 17C5313E9D6: to=, relay=smtp.sendgrid.net[167.89.123.53]:587, delay=0.47, delays=0.02/0.02/0.35/0.08, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 Ok: queued as MDDkRGxuSC28fIdiuMOxPA)
    Sep 23 05:33:59 mail postfix/qmgr[92193]: 17C5313E9D6: removed
    
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      It seems your Mac mail client is trying to connect to port 25 of the mail server when sending emails. You should configure the mail client to connect to port 587 or 465.

      • Danny Albocher
        3 years ago

        Thanks for the reply! Why shouldn’t the mail client connect with my server on port 25 (incoming)? If I understood you correctly, the client can connect with my server on 25, and my server will communicate with the world via relay (which it seems like it does successfully from the fact that “mail …” worked.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Port 25 is usually used for MTA to MTA communication. MTA stands for Mail Transfer Agent, aka SMTP server.

      Your mail client is MUA (Mail User Agent). Port 587 and 465 are used for MUA to MTA communication.

      Most residential ISPs block port 25. It doesn’t make sense for mail clients to use port 25 to submit outgoing emails.

      • Danny Albocher
        3 years ago

        Thanks. Understood. Interesting then that that was the default for the Mail client.

        Switched to 587, and it worked!

        Thanks 🙂

  • Delym
    3 years ago

    Hi Xiao,
    First of all,thank you for sharing the experience in seting up a mail server.
    I have through the Part 2 and followed every step to setup a mail server,while I test the server,the test account ([email protected],ubuntu is my Linux user)can not receive any email from any server,but can send a mail.The error messages are bellow(as the attachment):

    "The mail system : host mail.xxx.com[private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550
        5.1.1  User doesn't exist: [email protected] (in
        reply to RCPT TO command)"

    And the mail.log snippet:

    "
    Sep 29 08:46:18 localhost dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.2.33.2 (d6601f4ec) starting up for imap, pop3, lmtp, imap, lmtp, pop3 (core dumps disabled)
    Sep 29 08:46:19 localhost postfix/postfix-script[1659]: starting the Postfix mail system
    Sep 29 08:46:19 localhost postfix/master[1663]: daemon started -- version 3.3.0, configuration /etc/postfix
    Sep 29 08:47:06 localhost dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 13 secs): user=, rip=83.97.20.25, lip=172.17.0.5, session=
    Sep 29 08:48:50 localhost postfix/smtpd[2289]: connect from out20-85.mail.aliyun.com[115.124.20.85]
    Sep 29 08:48:50 localhost postfix/smtpd[2289]: Anonymous TLS connection established from out20-85.mail.aliyun.com[115.124.20.85]: TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
    Sep 29 08:48:50 localhost postfix/smtpd[2289]: ECFC88290A: client=out20-85.mail.aliyun.com[115.124.20.85]
    Sep 29 08:48:50 localhost postfix/cleanup[2302]: ECFC88290A: message-id=
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/qmgr[1667]: ECFC88290A: from=, size=1263, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost dovecot: lmtp(2305): Connect from local
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/lmtp[2304]: ECFC88290A: to=, relay=mail.xxx.com[private/dovecot-lmtp], delay=0.13, delays=0.05/0.01/0.05/0.02, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mail.xxx.com[private/dovecot-lmtp] said: 550 5.1.1  User doesn't exist: [email protected] (in reply to RCPT TO command))
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost dovecot: lmtp(2305): Disconnect from local: Successful quit
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/cleanup[2302]: 1320D8290D: message-id=
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/bounce[2310]: ECFC88290A: sender non-delivery notification: 1320D8290D
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/qmgr[1667]: 1320D8290D: from=, size=3377, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/qmgr[1667]: ECFC88290A: removed
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/smtpd[2289]: disconnect from out20-85.mail.aliyun.com[115.124.20.85] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=7
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/smtp[2312]: Untrusted TLS connection established to mxn.mxhichina.com[42.120.219.27]:25: TLSv1.2 with cipher AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/smtp[2312]: 1320D8290D: to=, relay=mxn.mxhichina.com[42.120.219.27]:25, delay=0.69, delays=0.01/0.01/0.11/0.57, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 Data Ok: queued as freedom)
    Sep 29 08:48:51 localhost postfix/qmgr[1667]: 1320D8290D: removed
    Sep 29 08:51:05 localhost dovecot: pop3-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 11 secs): user=, rip=83.97.20.25, lip=172.17.0.5, TLS: Disconnected, session=
    "

    The status of Dovecot:

    "
    dovecot.service - Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server
       Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dovecot.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
       Active: active (running) since Tue 2020-09-29 08:46:18 CST; 20min ago
         Docs: man:dovecot(1)
               http://wiki2.dovecot.org/
     Main PID: 1193 (dovecot)
        Tasks: 7 (limit: 4915)
       CGroup: /system.slice/dovecot.service
               ├─1193 /usr/sbin/dovecot -F
               ├─1329 dovecot/anvil
               ├─1331 dovecot/log
               ├─1335 dovecot/config
               ├─3177 dovecot/imap-login
               ├─3179 dovecot/ssl-params
               └─3184 dovecot/imap
    
    Sep 29 08:46:18 VM-0-5-ubuntu systemd[1]: Started Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server.
    Sep 29 08:46:18 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1193]: master: Dovecot v2.2.33.2 (d6601f4ec) starting up for imap, pop3, lmtp, imap, lmtp, pop3 (core dumps disabled)
    Sep 29 08:47:06 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 13 secs): user=, rip=83.97.20.25, lip=172.17.0.5, session=
    Sep 29 08:48:51 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: lmtp(2305): Connect from local
    Sep 29 08:48:51 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: lmtp(2305): Disconnect from local: Successful quit
    Sep 29 08:51:05 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: pop3-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 11 secs): user=, rip=83.97.20.25, lip=172.17.0.5, TLS: Disconnected, session=
    Sep 29 08:54:13 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=113.87.92.134, lip=172.17.0.5, mpid=3184, TLS, session=
    Sep 29 08:54:22 VM-0-5-ubuntu dovecot[1331]: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 11 secs): user=, rip=83.97.20.25, lip=172.17.0.5, TLS: Disconnected, session=
    "
    

    I have try to set the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf file and change the auth_username_format to
    auth_username_format = %Ln
    but it’s still not work !

    Could you help me to fix the issues?
    Thanks a lot!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Run the following command to list all available mailboxes on your server.

      sudo doveadm user '*'
  • Steve
    3 years ago

    I already set up Apache server using cloudflare origin certificate. do I still need another certificate for email? or Can I point to the same SSL cert i am using in Apache2 conf?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If your mail server hostname is mail.example.com and your current certificate covers mail.example.com, then you can use the current certificate.

  • Hello. Thank you for the tutorials, I am learning a lot and its nice to have solid independant resources to learn from.

    I have ran into a problem that I can not find a solution for. I will try to get help at #dovecot, but perhaps it’s something to bring up here as well. I successfully installed postfix and dovecot, and got connected through thunderbid and again on spark through my iphone. I successfuly add postfixadmin and did not retest the email. I moved on to trying to install roundcube and got to the config test and failed. Upon trying to relog into thunderbird and spark I was unable to login. Then I noticed I was unable to send email from the command line using postfix. I worked for awhile trying to find a solution and decided to start over.

    Eventually I decided to purge everything and try again, once I did postfix worked again in the command line, so I tried to jump ahead and test roundcube. Postfix went down again. I am back to a point where I can send from the terminal in postfix, and it appears dovecot is running correctly, but I am unable to login in from thunderbird and spark still. I ran journalctl -eu dovecot and the only oddity that I found is this…

    dovecot[10422]: auth: passwd-file(*user*,*clientip*,): unknown user
    *user* being my user name without the domain and *clientip* being my home ip address, as I am logged in through ssh.

    Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Run the following command to list all mailbox users on your server.

      sudo doveadm user '*'

      It seems you changed the userdb settings in the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/auth-system.conf.ext file.

      • This displayed my account in the vmail system, which is correctly configued. I had made no changes to the userdb setting in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/auth-system.conf.ext., the only variable uncommented is driver = passwd. I realize now that this issue belongs in a thread on part 3, so I will move it over there.

        Something much larger is going on here and I have spent many hours pouring over this to understand it and express it just in case anyone else comes across my issues so they don’t have to waste their time. The problem has too many oddities for it to be a simple error in syntax, or missed variable… etc. I have poured over the first 3 tutorials top to bottom and front to back, I am pretty certain I have everything correctly.

  • Rowan
    3 years ago

    When I configure the SMTP server on thunderbird I can use the server properly (port 587 with standard TLS OR 465 SSL) but in both cases when I send an e-mail to my gmail account, the e-mail is not encrypted (red lock icon). I believe it is because of the following:

     Oct 13 10:31:08 auth[125289]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
    Oct 13 10:31:08 auth[125289]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
    Oct 13 10:31:08 dovecot[123350]: imap(/my_user/): Connection closed (IDLE running for 0.001 + waiting in> 

    Can you help me?

    • Rowan
      3 years ago

      I should maybe have mentioned: 1. Thank you so much for the tutorial!!! 2. both SPF and DKIM pass when I send e-mails (from part 4 of the tutorial)

    • Rowan
      3 years ago

      AND, as from the other comments, the following params are set:

       smtpd_tls_security_level=may
      smtp_tls_loglevel=1 
    • Rowan
      3 years ago

      My bad, I was missing the following in my /etc/postfix/main.cf:

       smtp_tls_security_level=may
      smtpd_tls_loglevel=1

      I’m sorry for cluttering the comment section and again, grateful for the tutorial!!

    • Yadi Apriyadi
      3 years ago

      Just try this command to copy /etc/securetty

      sudo cp /usr/share/doc/util-linux/examples/securetty /etc/securetty

  • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
    3 years ago

    How to migrate from mbox to maildir

    If you previously use mbox mail format, now you want to migrate to maildir format, here’s how.
    Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf file.

    sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

    Go to the namespace inbox {} section, find the following line.

    #separator =

    Uncomment this line and specify separator for the inbox namespace.

    separator = /

    Then set

    mail_location=maildir:~/Maildir

    Save and close the file. Restart Dovecot for the changes to take effect.

    sudo systemctl restart dovecot

    Stop Postfix so there won’t be any new emails coming in.

    sudo systemctl stop postfix

    Then run the following command to convert mbox to maildir for a user. (Sometimes I found I need to manually type the command. If I copy and paste it in the terminal, sometimes it won’t won’t. I don’t know why.)

    sudo dsync -u username mirror mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/username

    If you have created folder in your mailbox, they will be converted as well and stored as hidden files under ~/Maildir.

    If you have followed part 3 to set up virtual mailbox, then you need to sync the Maildir for the virtual users. For example,

    sudo rsync -av --progress /home/xiao/Maildir/ /var/vmail/linuxbabe.com/xiao

    Then change the ownership to vmail user.

    sudo chown vmail:vmail /var/vmail/linuxbabe.com/xiao/ -R

    Now reload the webmail. If some folders don’t show anymore, don’t worry, they are still there. You just need to re-enable them in Roundcube webmail settings.

  • TIAMIYU SAHEED OLUWATOSIN
    3 years ago

    if you see this error this error

    ● dovecot.service – Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server
    Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dovecot.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2020-11-11 14:33:44 UTC; 6s ago
    Docs: man:dovecot(1)
    http://wiki2.dovecot.org/
    Process: 13110 ExecStop=/usr/bin/doveadm stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Process: 22093 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dovecot -F (code=exited, status=89)
    Main PID: 22093 (code=exited, status=89)

    Nov 11 14:33:44 mail.deeglowempire.com systemd[1]: Started Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server.
    Nov 11 14:33:44 mail.deeglowempire.com dovecot[22093]: doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf line 54: Unknown setting: ssl_min_protocol = TLSv1.2
    Nov 11 14:33:44 mail.deeglowempire.com systemd[1]: dovecot.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=89/n/a
    Nov 11 14:33:44 mail.deeglowempire.com systemd[1]: dovecot.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.

    OPEN /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf

    PLEASE COMMENT OUT THIS LINE

    #ssl_min_protocol = TLSv1.2

  • Gabriel
    3 years ago

    Hi, I noticed that to connect my email account to Thunderbird I have to disable Cloudflare option for my domain. Do you know what can cause such a problem ? When trying to set up an email account in Thunderbird with Cloudflare enabled, the program does not detect the server settings…

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      You should not enable the CDN (proxy) feature when creating DNS A record and AAAA record for the hostname of your mail server. Cloudflare doesn’t support SMTP or IMAP proxy 🙂

  • Antoni
    3 years ago

    Hi Xiao,
    Thank you for the tutorials. I fallowed everything and the server is running but when I try to send mail it is not delivered, on the log is written:

     postfix/smtp[10168]: connect to reception.mail-tester.com[94.23.206.89]:25: Connection timed out
     postfix/smtp[10168]: 81A55BD795: to=, relay=none, delay=31, delays=0.25/0.26/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to reception.mail-tester.com[94.23.206.89]:25: Connection timed out)
    
  • florian
    3 years ago

    Hi Xiao,

    thank you very much for the comprehensive tutorial! Basically everything works and I can send and receive mails. However postfix keeps randomly shutting down. Sometimes when I try to send an email and sometimes just by itself. Do you have any clue why such a thing occurrs?

    Nov 21 16:18:58 mail postfix/postfix-script[2572]: stopping the Postfix mail system
    Nov 21 16:18:58 mail postfix/master[2509]: terminating on signal 15
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      You can open the /var/log/syslog file to see if you can find any clue. Search for the word “kill” in this file.

      For example,

      systemd invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x14200ca(GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE), nodemask=(null), order=0, oom_score_adj=0
      Out of memory: Kill process 18211 (mysqld) score 245 or sacrifice child
      

      This indicates the server ran out of memory, so it killed the mysqld process.

      • florian
        3 years ago

        Thanks for the response. Actually it was the monit process that was killing it. I don’t know how it was configured but disabling fixed the problem

  • Scott
    3 years ago

    Hello Xiao, Love your tutorials. I’ve followed parts 1 and 2 for setting up postfix and dovecote on ubuntu 20.04 and able to connect and log into imaps, but cannot get ports 465 and 587 to listen. The result from netstat is:

     tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      176810/master 

    and submission and smtps as in your instructions are followed in postfix master.cf

     smtps     inet  n       -       y       -       -       smtpd
     -o syslog_name=postfix/smtps
     -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes
     -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
     -o smtpd_relay_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
     -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
     -o smtpd_sasl_type=dovecot
     -o smtpd_sasl_path=private/auth

    and dovecot.conf unix listener

     service lmtp {
     unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp {
       mode = 0600
       user = postfix
       group = postfix
      }
    }

    Been over this for the past 2 weeks looking for errors in the logs and not information reported in mail.log and dovecote.log. You help will be very much a time saver.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Stop Postfix.

      sudo systemctl stop postfix

      Do a health check.

      sudo postfix check

      Run it in the foreground.

      sudo postfix start-fg

      The output might give you some clues.

  • Scott
    3 years ago

    Xiao,
    from sudo postfix check

    /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/post-install: Error: /etc/postfix/postfix-files is not a file.
    postfix/postfix-script: warning: unable to create missing queue directories
    postfix/postfix-script: warning: symlink leaves directory: /etc/postfix/./makedefs.out

    checked the makedefs.out

    # Do not edit -- this file documents how Postfix was built for your machine.
    #----------------------------------------------------------------
    # Start of summary of user-configurable 'make makefiles' options.
    # CCARGS=-g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -DDEBIAN -DHAS_PCRE -DHAS_LDAP -DUSE_LDAP_SASL -DHAS_SQLITE -DMYORIGIN_FROM_FILE  -DHAS_CDB -DHAS_LMDB -DHAS_MYSQL -I/usr/include/mysql -DHAS_PGSQL -I/usr/include/postgresql -DHAS_SQLITE -I/usr/include -DHAS_SSL -I/usr/include/openssl -DUSE_SASL_AUTH -I/usr/include/sasl -DUSE_CYRUS_SASL -DUSE_TLS
    # AUXLIBS=-lssl -lcrypto -lsasl2 -lpthread -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -L/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13/debian
    # AUXLIBS_CDB=-lcdb -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    # AUXLIBS_LMDB=-llmdb -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    # AUXLIBS_MYSQL=-lmysqlclient -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    # AUXLIBS_LDAP=-lldap -llber -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    # AUXLIBS_PCRE=-lpcre -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    # AUXLIBS_SQLITE=-lsqlite3 -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global -lpthread
    # AUXLIBS_PGSQL=-lpq -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    # shared=yes
    # dynamicmaps=yes
    # pie=yes
    # daemon_directory=/usr/lib/postfix/sbin
    # html_directory=/usr/share/doc/postfix/html
    # manpage_directory=/usr/share/man
    # readme_directory=/usr/share/doc/postfix
    # End of summary of user-configurable 'make makefiles' options.
    #--------------------------------------------------------------
    # System-dependent settings and compiler/linker overrides.
    SYSTYPE	= LINUX4
    _AR	= ar
    ARFL	= rv
    _RANLIB	= ranlib
    SYSLIBS	= -pie -z relro -z now -lssl -lcrypto -lsasl2 -lpthread -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -L/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13/debian -ldb -lnsl -lresolv -ldl -licui18n -licuuc -licudata 
    AUXLIBS_CDB = -lcdb -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    AUXLIBS_LDAP = -lldap -llber -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    AUXLIBS_LMDB = -llmdb -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    AUXLIBS_MYSQL = -lmysqlclient -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    AUXLIBS_PCRE = -lpcre -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util
    AUXLIBS_PGSQL = -lpq -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global
    AUXLIBS_SQLITE = -lsqlite3 -L../../lib -L. -lpostfix-util -lpostfix-global -lpthread
    CC	= gcc -fPIC -I. -I../../include -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -DDEBIAN -DHAS_PCRE -DHAS_LDAP -DUSE_LDAP_SASL -DHAS_SQLITE -DMYORIGIN_FROM_FILE -DHAS_CDB -DHAS_LMDB -DHAS_MYSQL -I/usr/include/mysql -DHAS_PGSQL -I/usr/include/postgresql -DHAS_SQLITE -I/usr/include -DHAS_SSL -I/usr/include/openssl -DUSE_SASL_AUTH -I/usr/include/sasl -DUSE_CYRUS_SASL -DUSE_TLS -DHAS_DEV_URANDOM -DDEF_DAEMON_DIR=\"/usr/lib/postfix/sbin\" -DDEF_HTML_DIR=\"/usr/share/doc/postfix/html\" -DDEF_MANPAGE_DIR=\"/usr/share/man\" -DDEF_README_DIR=\"/usr/share/doc/postfix\" -DUSE_DYNAMIC_LIBS -DUSE_DYNAMIC_MAPS $(WARN)
    OPT	= -O2
    DEBUG	= -g
    AWK	= awk
    STRCASE = 
    EXPORT	= CCARGS='-I. -I../../include -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -DDEBIAN -DHAS_PCRE -DHAS_LDAP -DUSE_LDAP_SASL -DHAS_SQLITE -DMYORIGIN_FROM_FILE -DHAS_CDB -DHAS_LMDB -DHAS_MYSQL -I/usr/include/mysql -DHAS_PGSQL -I/usr/include/postgresql -DHAS_SQLITE -I/usr/include -DHAS_SSL -I/usr/include/openssl -DUSE_SASL_AUTH -I/usr/include/sasl -DUSE_CYRUS_SASL -DUSE_TLS -DHAS_DEV_URANDOM -DDEF_DAEMON_DIR=\"/usr/lib/postfix/sbin\" -DDEF_HTML_DIR=\"/usr/share/doc/postfix/html\" -DDEF_MANPAGE_DIR=\"/usr/share/man\" -DDEF_README_DIR=\"/usr/share/doc/postfix\" -DUSE_DYNAMIC_LIBS -DUSE_DYNAMIC_MAPS' OPT='-O2' DEBUG='-g'
    WARN	= -Wall -Wno-comment -Wformat -Wimplicit -Wmissing-prototypes \
    	-Wparentheses -Wstrict-prototypes -Wswitch -Wuninitialized \
    	-Wunused -Wno-missing-braces -fcommon
    DEFINED_MAP_TYPES = pcre ldap sqlite cdb lmdb mysql pgsql ssl dev_urandom
    MAKE_FIX = 
    # Switch between Postfix static and dynamically-linked libraries.
    AR	= :
    RANLIB	= :
    LIB_PREFIX = postfix-
    LIB_SUFFIX = .so
    SHLIB_CFLAGS = -fPIC
    SHLIB_DIR = /usr/lib/postfix
    SHLIB_ENV = LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13/lib
    SHLIB_LD = gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,${LIB}
    SHLIB_SYSLIBS = -lssl -lcrypto -lsasl2 -lpthread -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -L/build/postfix-q6EyY5/postfix-3.4.13/debian -ldb -lnsl -lresolv -ldl -licui18n -licuuc -licudata
    SHLIB_RPATH = -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,-rpath,${SHLIB_DIR}
    # Switch between dynamicmaps.cf plugins and hard-linked databases.
    NON_PLUGIN_MAP_OBJ = 
    PLUGIN_MAP_OBJ = $(MAP_OBJ)
    PLUGIN_MAP_OBJ_UPDATE = plugin_map_obj_update
    PLUGIN_MAP_SO_MAKE = plugin_map_so_make
    PLUGIN_MAP_SO_UPDATE = plugin_map_so_update
    PLUGIN_LD = gcc -shared
    POSTFIX_INSTALL_OPTS = 
    # Application-specific rules.

    Could it be a permissions issue?

  • Scott
    3 years ago

    Xiao,
    Problem solved. The file /etc/postfix/postfix-files was not created on the install (there was a directory instead named postfix-files.d). Created file by touch postfix-files and presto magic, ports 465 and 587 appeared. Thanks for your time.

    sudo netstat sudo netstat -lnpt | grep master
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:587             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      46819/master        
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:465             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      46819/master        
    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      46819/master        
    
  • IMRON HS
    3 years ago

    Hi Xiao, always got the error when I try to send mail:

    Unable to send email to [email protected]!

    But when I restart my postfix:

    sudo systemctl restart postfix

    I can send my email.
    But after that, I get the error again “Unable to send email to [email protected]!”

    This is my mail.log:

    root@mail:~# tail -f /var/log/mail.log 
    Nov 29 01:24:36 mail postfix/postfix-script[5126]: fatal: the Postfix mail system is already running
    Nov 29 01:24:41 mail dovecot: master: Warning: Killed with signal 15 (by pid=5140 uid=0 code=kill)
    Nov 29 01:24:42 mail dovecot: log(4493): Warning: Killed with signal 15 (by pid=1 uid=0 code=kill)
    Nov 29 01:24:42 mail dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.3.9.2 (cf2918cac) starting up for imap, lmtp (core dumps disabled)
    Nov 29 01:26:39 mail opendkim[584]: OpenDKIM Filter v2.11.0 starting (args: -x /etc/opendkim.conf)
    Nov 29 01:30:29 mail postfix/postfix-script[2192]: starting the Postfix mail system
    Nov 29 01:30:29 mail postfix/master[2196]: daemon started -- version 3.3.0, configuration /etc/postfix
    Nov 29 01:30:35 mail dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.3.9.2 (cf2918cac) starting up for imap, lmtp (core dumps disabled)
    Nov 29 01:30:39 mail postfix/postfix-script[2249]: stopping the Postfix mail system
    Nov 29 01:30:39 mail postfix/master[2196]: terminating on signal 15
    

    Can you help me? THANK YOU!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      I don’t know why, but some folks have problems after installing Monit. Try disabling Monit.

      sudo systemctl stop monit
      sudo systemctl disable monit
      • IMRON HS
        3 years ago

        I have try this sir:

        sudo systemctl stop monit
        sudo systemctl disable monit
        

        But stil got the error, but when I try remove monit.

        sudo apt-get remove  monit
        sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove monit
        sudo apt-get purge monit
        sudo systemctl restart postfix dovecot
        

        Now I can send message anytime.

      • Florian
        2 years ago

        Here is what monit log kept sending after restarting postfix:

        'postfix' failed to start -- could not start required services: 'master_bin'

        perhaps this is of any help Xiao?

  • Daniel Alberto Guglielmi
    3 years ago

    Hello, I get an error when I’m trying to run the following command:
    sudo doveadm user ‘*’

    RESULT:
    Error: auth-master: userdb list: User listing returned failure
    Fatal: user listing failed

    Any idea of what can I do to fix it?
    Regards,

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Can you check the /var/log/mail.log file to see if there are any errors in the log?

  • Illia Polianskyi
    3 years ago

    Hello
    as I tried to log in in thunderbird, I had dovecot log like user=

    Dec 12 04:50:06 polanski dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts in 0 secs): user=, rip=167.248.133.39, lip=178.165.47.83, TLS: Disconnected, session=
    

    I created a unix user and dovecot doesn’t sees it,
    thunderbird says cant login wrong pass or username

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Maybe you should reboot your server?

  • Illia Polianskyi
    3 years ago

    hello Xiao, thanks for quick answer
    I restarted dovecot many times, dovecot lists mailusers only [email protected]
    I created unix user info, it doesn’t list it
    thunderbird says cant login to smtp server wrong user or pass

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If you followed part 3, then you can no longer use Unix accounts as email addresses. You must create virtual users in PostfixAdmin.

  • Illia Polianskyi
    3 years ago

    I didn’t follow part 3 since I’m afraid it removes mysql db
    I just wish one single mail user, it’s enough with single unix user
    but can’t login, and mail.log doesn’t write anything about dovecot attempts, or last one was like user=<>

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Then you probably have followed tutorials on other websites. Don’t mix up mail server tutorials from different websites.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If you don’t know where’s wrong, you can add the following line in the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file,

      mail_debug=yes

      then restart dovecot, so dovecot will produce debugging message in the /var/log/mail.log file.

  • Illia Polianskyi
    3 years ago

    ok, I can now login as I rebuilt it all
    now gmail says as I try to send to gmail address

    relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[64.233.162.27]:25, delay=1, delays=0.12/0.02/0.56/0.31, dsn=5.7.26, status=bounced (host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[64.233.162.27] said: 550-5.7.26 This message does not have authentication information or fails to 550-5.7.26 pass authentication checks. To best protect our users from spam, the 550-5.7.26 message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.26  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more 550 5.7.26 information. z24si4673817ljk.414 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command))
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Make sure you have set PTR record for the IP address of your mail server. And follow part 4 to set up SFP and DKIM.

  • Illia Polianskyi
    3 years ago

    Hello,
    why incoming mails from google for example are removed automatically?
    log writes message delivered, but then log writes “removed”

    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/smtpd[2600]: connect from mail-lf1-f48.google.com[209.85.167.48]
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/smtpd[2600]: Anonymous TLS connection established from mail-lf1-f48.google.com[209.85.167.48]: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (128/128 bits)
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/smtpd[2600]: 92DC87E0FBD: client=mail-lf1-f48.google.com[209.85.167.48]
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/cleanup[2607]: 92DC87E0FBD: message-id=
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/qmgr[29282]: 92DC87E0FBD: from=, size=4104, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/local[2608]: 92DC87E0FBD: to=, relay=local, delay=0.11, delays=0.09/0.01/0/0.01, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to mailbox)
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/qmgr[29282]: 92DC87E0FBD: removed
    Dec 12 08:56:28 polanski postfix/smtpd[2600]: disconnect from mail-lf1-f48.google.com[209.85.167.48] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=7
    
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      It’s removed from the Postfix mail queue, not removed from the message store (Inbox).

  • Thomas
    3 years ago

    Hello Xiao,
    Thank you for the guide 🙂
    I am stuck with Roundcube setup.
    Can’t login:

    Remote login error:
    IMAP connect: NOT OK(Login failed for [email protected] against mail.dkboyz.dk from 192.168.1.1. Could not connect to ssl://mail.dkboyz.dk:993: Unknown reason)

    Local error (from the ubuntu 20.4 server):
    roundcube connection to storage server failed

    I think that it’s a problem with Dovecot, because i get this when i run systemctl status dovecot:

    Dec 17 10:40:02 mail.dkboyz.dk systemd[1]: Started Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server.
    Dec 17 10:40:02 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142249]: master: Dovecot v2.3.7.2 (3c910f64b) starting up for imap, lmtp, sieve, imap, lmtp, sieve (core dumps disabled)
    Dec 17 10:40:28 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can't load SSL certificate: There is no valid PEM certificate.: >
    Dec 17 10:40:28 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: auth: Debug: Loading modules from directory: /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/auth
    Dec 17 10:40:28 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: auth: Debug: Module loaded: /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/auth/lib20_auth_var_expand_crypt.so
    Dec 17 10:40:28 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: auth: Debug: Module loaded: /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/auth/libdriver_mysql.so
    Dec 17 10:40:28 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: auth: Debug: Read auth token secret from /var/run/dovecot/auth-token-secret.dat
    Dec 17 10:40:47 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: auth: Debug: auth client connected (pid=142349)
    Dec 17 10:40:47 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can't load SSL certificate: There is no valid PEM certificate.: >
    Dec 17 10:41:10 mail.dkboyz.dk dovecot[142252]: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can't load SSL certificate: There is no valid PEM certificate.: >
    

    I can’t seem to fix the problem.
    Maybe you could lead me in the right direction?

    Regards
    Thomas

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Dovecot can’t find your SSL certificate. Open the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf file, make sure you specify the correct location of your SSL certificate and private key.

      ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/fullchain.pem
      ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.your-domain.com/privkey.pem
      
  • thomas
    3 years ago

    Is this wrong???
    It’s from the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf file.

    ‘# SSL/TLS support: yes, no, required.
    ssl = required
    ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/dkboyz.dk-0001/fullchain.pem
    ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/dkboyz.dk-0001/privkey.pem

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      It seems your certificate files are corrupted. Renew your certificate.

      sudo certbot renew --force-renewal

      Then restart Postfix and Dovecot.

      sudo systemctl restart postfix dovecot
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Dovecot should use the certificate for mail.dkboyz.dk. The configuration should be:

      ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.dkboyz.dk/fullchain.pem
      ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.dkboyz.dk/privkey.pem
      

      The certificate for dkboyz.dk is irrelevant.

      • David
        3 years ago

        I am also getting this error. I have removed certbot and purged it. Deleted the letsencrypt directory and sub directories. Re-installed certbot and regenerate the certs. These are the paths in my file
        ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.aheart4god.us/fullchain.pem
        ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.aheart4god.us/privkey.pem

        I am able to cd into that directory copying the path from the line above.
        I did a force renew and restarted the postfix and dovecot. Still getting the error No Valid PEM.

        any ideas?

        • David
          3 years ago

          Could this be causing a problem?

          LISTEN 0 0 *:587 *:* users:((“smtpd”,pid=2823,fd=6),(“master”,pid=2606,fd=16))

  • Christian Shannon
    3 years ago

    Hey Xiao,

    Thanks for the guide, good job. I just wanted to let you know that if you have more host names, it is actually easier just to use the temporary server when doing the challenge. I needed it for 4 host names and did the following.

    
    certbot certonly --cert-name babe.dk  -d babe.dk -d mail.babe.dk -d www.babe.dk -d dea.dk -d mail.dea.dk -d www.dea.dk
    
    How would you like to authenticate with the ACME CA?
    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    1: Apache Web Server plugin (apache)
    2: Spin up a temporary webserver (standalone)
    3: Place files in webroot directory (webroot)
    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    Select the appropriate number [1-3] then [enter] (press 'c' to cancel): 2
    Plugins selected: Authenticator standalone, Installer None
    Obtaining a new certificate
    
    IMPORTANT NOTES:
     - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
       /etc/letsencrypt/live/babe.dk/fullchain.pem
       Your key file has been saved at:
       /etc/letsencrypt/live/babe.dk/privkey.pem
    

    Made my life a little easier 😉

    /Christian

  • sokha
    3 years ago

    when i try to install certificate
    sudo certbot certonly -a nginx –agree-tos –no-eff-email –staple-ocsp –email [email protected] -d mail.your-domain.com i got output
    Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
    Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer None
    Obtaining a new certificate
    Performing the following challenges:
    http-01 challenge for mail.mydomain.com
    Waiting for verification…
    Challenge failed for domain mail.mydomain.com
    http-01 challenge for mail.mydomain.com
    Cleaning up challenges
    Some challenges have failed.

    IMPORTANT NOTES:
    – The following errors were reported by the server:

    Domain: mail.mydomain.com
    Type: unauthorized
    Detail: Invalid response from
    http://mail.mydomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/xT1TZ3cDXxx-9pk_XAplZcoPf6uprT0mUsSHNMkU2eI
    [119.15.81.237]: “\r\n404 Not<br /> Found\r\n\r\n

    404 Not
    Found

    \r\n


    nginx/1.18.0 (Ub”

    To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
    entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
    contain(s) the right IP address.

  • peacecop kalmer:
    3 years ago

    After upgrading to “20.10”, I can’t receive any mails with “Thunderbird”. I can only send out but with an error message that the message couldn’t be copied to the “sent”-folder. “Thunderbird” keeps telling me “[email protected]: Checking mail server capabilities…” in the status bar. “mail.err” has repeatedly this error message:

    “Jan 21 00:43:58 test dovecot: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context: Can’t load DH parameters (ssl_dh setting): error:1408518A:SSL routines:ssl3_ctx_ctrl:dh key too small: user=, rip=192.168.1.1, lip=192.168.1.173, session=”

    What does it mean and how can I repair my mail server?

    • i have a similar error, i’ve managed to send out emails, but Thunderbird told me “There was an error saving the message to Sent Messages. Retry?”. i could find incoming emails saved under /Maildir/cur, but no copy saved under /Maildir/.Sent for outgoing emails

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Maybe you need to generate the Diffie-Hellman parameter with:

      sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/dovecot/dh.pem 4096

      Then set

      ssl_dh = </etc/dovecot/dh.pem

      in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf file.

  • Aaron
    3 years ago

    Thank you for this, all working perfectly, I am a linux newbie, always used windows in the past, you have made me want to learn a lot more about linux : )

  • 5chris
    3 years ago

    Hi Guoan,

    somehow i can’t get my android (outlook client) to send email to my ubuntu configured with dovecot and postfix with smtp auth.

    I assume dovecot is the one for performing smtp-auth(?)
    can you post some example, such as doveconf -Pn for references?

    i can send out fine (to gmail), I can send from gmail to the vps fine too.

    thanks

    • 5chris
      3 years ago

      want to supplement more information.
      – i want to compose an email from android outlook and relay to my ubuntu (20.04) vps, setup with dovecot, postfix and postfixadmin vmail.
      – i can actually send successful, when using gmail android client setup
      – i cannot send successful when using the outlook android client setup.

      could be something with microsoft …again.
      do let me know anything can be shared to look into it.

      thanks

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      As a rule of thumb, you should always check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) on your mail server when an error happens.

  • Thank you for this;
    i can send emails from my email client but i don’t receive emails sent to me. My log is attached below

     imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=*****, lip=******, mpid=8035, TLS, session=
    
    imap(*****): Connection closed (LIST finished 0.264 secs ago) in=50 out=1218 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=0 body_bytes=0
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      If you can’t receive emails from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, here are the possible causes:

      1. Your MX record is wrong, or not propagated to the Internet yet.
      2. Your mail server hostname doesn’t have DNS A record, or not propagated to the Internet yet.
      3. Your firewall doesn’t allow incoming connection to port 25. Maybe your mail server is behind a NAT?
      4. Postfix isn’t listening on the public IP address.
      5. Check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) to find out if there are other errors in your Postfix and Dovecot configuration.

      You can use the Network Tools Email Checker to test if your SMTP server is reachable from the Internet. Just enter your domain email address and click the Go button. As you can see from the screenshot below, it successfully found my domain’s MX record and my SMTP server is reachable from the Internet.

      email checker

      If your SMTP servers isn’t reachable from the Internet, then you have a problem in the first 4 items. If your SMTP server is reachable from the Internet, but you still can’t receive emails, check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) to find out if there is any errors in your Postfix and Dovecot configuration.

      Your posted mail log is too short and I can’t work out a conclusion.

  • Omar Muneeb
    3 years ago

    This is indeed one of the best, if not the only, step-by-step tutorial on making real-life email system. I having been trying to make this happen for 3 days with no fruitful results, until I read this series and followed it step by step.
    Thank you a lot!

  • Danran
    3 years ago

    sudo doveadm user ‘*’
    returns:

    nobody
    systemd-coredump
    lxd
    Danran
    Error: auth-master: userdb list: User listing returned failure
    Fatal: user listing failed

    How do I start debugging this?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      As a rule of thumb, you should always check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) on your mail server when an error happens

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        Thank you. So i figured out that I missed a step just before running the sudo doveadm user’*’ command. I forgot to add a user. After running sudo adduser user1, My user list now looks correct! Thank you so much!

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          Wait, Im realizing, that this worked by adding a user, But my mistake was that I already was using a home user, not root. Do i need two seperate user account for this to work? Because that is the condition for me that makes this work. If i stick to one home user account, then i get the same error again.

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          I dont’ know exactly what I did, but now, I’m back to square one, but worse, because I’m getting absolutely zero errors in my logs now. The logs look clean, showing dovecot and postfix both running smoothly. Emails are seemingly working. But now,

          sudo doveadm user ‘*’
          returns:
          Error: auth-master: userdb list: User listing returned failure
          Fatal: user listing failed

          and thats it. I’ve gone up and down my config files and logs. I did a clean install and tried from scratch again with the same problem surfacing. As of now, I’m at a total loss as to how I can fix this. I wish there was the equivilent of nginx -t for dovecot, so I could somehow know which line in which file has the broken syntax. I’m relatively close to going out of my mind after a good 6 hour staring contest with my computer! lol. Any more ideas here?

  • Danran
    3 years ago

    My mailbox is having issues saving sent mail to the sent folder when trying to send an email from thunderbird.
    Below is the issue the message thunderbird gives me when “Un?Successfully” sending mail:

    Your message was sent but a copy was not placed in your sent folder (Sent) due to network or file access errors.
    You can retry or save the message locally to Local Folders/[email protected]

    Any advice as how to debug this problem would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for a great tutorial!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      As a rule of thumb, you should always check the mail log (/var/log/mail.log) on your mail server when an error happens

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      I think your problem is the same as Luis Pereira. It’s likely that you forgot to set auth_username_format = %n In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf file.

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        Thanks for the reply! I did check the auth_username_format = %n in 10-auth.conf file, and it was actually setup correctly. When I have some time to get back into this I will post some the logs that I am finding. Maybe you can help!

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        I’m still having the same issue after doing a clean install and following the guide again. What could be the issue? Please help?

        tail -f /var/log/mail.log

        Apr 10 14:14:10 mail postfix/anvil[2714]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:203.159.80.233) at Apr 10 14:10:49
        Apr 10 14:14:10 mail postfix/anvil[2714]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:203.159.80.233) at Apr 10 14:10:49
        Apr 10 14:14:10 mail postfix/anvil[2714]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Apr 10 14:10:49
        Apr 10 14:17:57 mail postfix/postfix-script[2793]: stopping the Postfix mail system
        Apr 10 14:17:57 mail postfix/master[2175]: terminating on signal 15
        Apr 10 14:17:58 mail postfix/postfix-script[2915]: warning: symlink leaves directory: /etc/postfix/./makedefs.out
        Apr 10 14:17:59 mail postfix/postfix-script[3081]: starting the Postfix mail system
        Apr 10 14:17:59 mail postfix/master[3083]: daemon started -- version 3.4.13, configuration /etc/postfix
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail dovecot: master: Warning: SIGHUP received - reloading configuration
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail dovecot: imap(danran): Server shutting down. in=13075 out=54029 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=0 body_bytes=0
        Apr 10 14:20:51 mail dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.1.254, lip=192.168.2.2, mpid=3125, TLS, session=
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/smtps/smtpd[3127]: connect from unknown[192.168.1.254]
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/smtps/smtpd[3127]: Anonymous TLS connection established from unknown[192.168.1.254]: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (128/128 bits) key-exchange X25519 server-signature RSA-PSS (2048 bits) server-digest SHA256
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/smtps/smtpd[3127]: E46733EF21: client=unknown[192.168.1.254], sasl_method=PLAIN, sasl_username=danran
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/cleanup[3132]: E46733EF21: message-id=
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/qmgr[3085]: E46733EF21: from=, size=620, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail postfix/smtps/smtpd[3127]: disconnect from unknown[192.168.1.254] ehlo=1 auth=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=6
        Apr 10 14:21:14 mail postfix/smtp[3133]: Untrusted TLS connection established to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.136.26]:25: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (256/256 bits) key-exchange X25519 server-signature ECDSA (P-256) server-digest SHA256
        Apr 10 14:21:14 mail postfix/smtp[3133]: E46733EF21: to=, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.136.26]:25, delay=1.1, delays=0.08/0.03/0.34/0.61, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK  1618082474 f15si6905894ilc.41 - gsmtp)
        Apr 10 14:21:14 mail postfix/qmgr[3085]: E46733EF21: removed
        
        Apr 10 14:23:24 mail postfix/smtpd[3135]: connect from mail-il1-f173.google.com[209.85.166.173]
        Apr 10 14:23:25 mail postfix/smtpd[3135]: Anonymous TLS connection established from mail-il1-f173.google.com[209.85.166.173]: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (128/128 bits) key-exchange X25519 server-signature RSA-PSS (2048 bits) server-digest SHA256
        Apr 10 14:23:25 mail postfix/smtpd[3135]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-il1-f173.google.com[209.85.166.173]: 550 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
        Apr 10 14:23:25 mail postfix/smtpd[3135]: disconnect from mail-il1-f173.google.com[209.85.166.173] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 bdat=0/1 quit=1 commands=5/7
        

        sudo service dovecot status

        ● dovecot.service - Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server
             Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dovecot.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
             Active: active (running) since Sat 2021-04-10 07:26:16 CDT; 7h ago
               Docs: man:dovecot(1)
                     http://wiki2.dovecot.org/
            Process: 3107 ExecReload=/usr/bin/doveadm reload (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
           Main PID: 1804 (dovecot)
              Tasks: 7 (limit: 9256)
             CGroup: /system.slice/dovecot.service
                     ├─1804 /usr/sbin/dovecot -F
                     ├─1884 dovecot/anvil
                     ├─3108 dovecot/log
                     ├─3119 dovecot/imap-login
                     ├─3120 dovecot/config
                     ├─3121 dovecot/stats
                     └─3125 dovecot/imap
        
        Apr 10 14:13:49 mail.facl.xyz dovecot[1885]: auth-worker(2733): Error: getpwent() failed: Invalid argument
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail.facl.xyz systemd[1]: Reloading Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server.
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail.facl.xyz dovecot[1804]: master: Warning: SIGHUP received - reloading configuration
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail.facl.xyz systemd[1]: Reloaded Dovecot IMAP/POP3 email server.
        Apr 10 14:18:18 mail.facl.xyz dovecot[1885]: imap(danran): Server shutting down. in=13075 out=54029 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=0 body_bytes=0
        Apr 10 14:20:51 mail.facl.xyz auth[3124]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
        Apr 10 14:20:51 mail.facl.xyz auth[3124]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
        Apr 10 14:20:51 mail.facl.xyz dovecot[3108]: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.1.254, lip=192.168.2.2, mpid=3125, TLS, session=
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail.facl.xyz auth[3124]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
        Apr 10 14:21:13 mail.facl.xyz auth[3124]: pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory
        

        sudo service postfix status

        ● postfix.service - Postfix Mail Transport Agent
             Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/postfix.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
             Active: active (exited) since Sat 2021-04-10 14:17:59 CDT; 10min ago
            Process: 3086 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
           Main PID: 3086 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        
        Apr 10 14:17:59 mail.facl.xyz systemd[1]: Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent...
        Apr 10 14:17:59 mail.facl.xyz systemd[1]: Finished Postfix Mail Transport Agent.
        
    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago
      dovecot[1885]: auth-worker(2733): Error: getpwent() failed: Invalid argument

      This indicates there is an error in your Dovecot configuration file. Probably a syntax error.

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        Thank you so much. I’ve gone over and over and over my config files time and time again, and am not seeing anything suspocious. Is there any way to figure out which line in what file is causing this? Any command like the equivilant of “sudo nginx -t”? You help and your guide are much appreciated!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Probably the error is in the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf file. This tutorial shows you how to edit the service auth section. You don’t need to edit the service auth-woker section.

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        Okay excellent! I will work on this and get back to you! Thank you so much!

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          PROBLEM SOLVED! The /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf file still had the following uncommented:
          unix_listener auth-userdb {
          #mode = 0600
          #user =
          #group =
          }

          After commenting out the unix_listener Auth-userdb {
          and the
          }
          this issue seems to now be a non-issue and its working! Thanks a ton!

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          Thank you for all of your help! Do you think you might be able to give me a second pair of eyes on my 10-master.conf file? I have posted it on pastebin permanently (and publicly) and will keep it there forever, to help others if they encounter a similar problem. Pastbin seems to be important for proper formatting of the file so thats why I pasted it there. Please let me know if you see anything wrong with this file! I just cannot figure out whats wront and why my thunderbird won’t move its messages to the sent folder, even though sent emails go out and work. Thanks a ton Xiao! You are a master of tutorials!

      • Danran
        3 years ago

        Well, forget about my previous solution. I sweaer I didnt touch anything, but when I came back to test my emails on my server again, the exact problem came back. Either I’m not seeing something or i’m going crazy at this point, becausie I’ve gone over my 10-master.conf file for more than 4 hours. Back and forth back and forth up and down, and I just cannot figure out whats wrong with my file. Could I post my file here or email it to you possibly, and maybe have you take a look at it? Maybe you will see something I’m not seeing. It would be so much appreciated Xiao!

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          Ahh, forgot to mention, I am no longer seeing any errors with “`sudo service dovecot status“`. The only odd lin that comes up is “pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn’t open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory”. My /var/log/mail.log is showing no errors either. I just cant figure out where the problem lies.

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          My thunderbird still gives me “Your message was sent but a copy was not placed in your sent folder (Sent) due to network or file access errors.
          You can retry or save the message locally to Local Folders/[email protected].”

        • Danran
          3 years ago

          https://pastebin.com/gKZxq4J0

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Found nothing wrong in your file. May you can check the Dovecot logs with sudo journalctl -eu dovecot. It might also be a thunderbird problem. See here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1299140.

      • Jim W.
        3 years ago

        I had this same issue. In the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-mailboxes.conf I had added the “auto = create” line under both
        mailbox Sent {
        and
        mailbox “Sent Messages” {
        After I removed “auto = create” under mailbox “Sent Messages” { . The Sent folder was created and the error went away in Thunderbird. I think you have to choose one or the other. If you choose both it doesn’t create either.
        The comments above them say:
        ———
        # For \Sent mailboxes there are two widely used names. We’ll mark both of
        # them as \Sent. User typically deletes one of them if duplicates are created.”
        ——–
        So I guess you can delete one of them also. I just left the “Sent Messages” there but didn’t add “auto = create” under it. Since it says something about marking them both as Sent. Not sure if it is necessary. Only have the one “Sent” folder created on my server though, so it’s working as it is supposed to.

        • Danran
          2 years ago

          Hey, thanks for the tip Jim W. I Finally got around to making this edit, and unfortunately I am still having the same problem. Any other ideas?

        • Jim W.
          2 years ago

          No sorry Danran. All I know is that is what fixed the error for me. Did you remember to restart the server after you made the change?

  • Luis Pereira
    3 years ago

    Hello Xiao.

    I discovered your guide which is a great guide and very detailed. It allows to learn a lot about the process and the terms involved.

    I reached this point (part 2), and I can send and receive emails, however, Dovecot does not seem to pick the received emails, and for that I cannot view them on Thunderbird, only with the “mail” command. The only error I get on the log files is this one:

    pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn't open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory

    Currently I’m not with lmtp enabled, because I tried with it and I did not receive any email at all, returning user not found by the email server.

    Do you know what can I be missing? I rechecked my config twice.

    Thank you very much

    • Luis Pereira
      3 years ago

      So I managed to make the connection from thunderbird. I set the “home_mailbox” on the postfix config to the Maildir folder, as was set on Dovecot.

      But was this the right way? Or I’m I missing something that should be the Dovecot service moving the email?

      And now, the mail command only shows old messanges in “/var/mail”, is that also supposed to be the behaviour?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      What’s the value of auth_username_format in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf ?

      • Luis Pereira
        3 years ago

        I didn’t set one, as I would like to login only with username.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      By default, when Dovecot tries to find or deliver emails for a user, it uses the full email address. Since in this part, we only set up canonical mail users (using OS users as the mailbox user), Dovecot can’t find the user in full domain format ([email protected]), so we need to set auth_username_format = %n to drop the domain part, then Dovecot should be able to find the mailbox user and you will be able to use Dovecot LMTP to deliver emails. The home_mailbox is not needed now.

      LMTP is required if you want to follow part 3 to set up virtual domain mailbox.

    • Danran
      3 years ago

      Thank you so much for this info Jim W. This is most likely my mistake as well! When I get back at my server, I will make the changes you suggested, and report back to confirm! Thanks so much for chiming in here!

  • Luis Pereira
    3 years ago

    Oh, alright, I didn’t understood that. That solved the problem. Thank you very much.

    Yes I’ll follow all parts. I recently helped create a mail server with virtualmin, and I want to understand all the raw steps thats necessary to create a mail server (and if everything works, I’ll use it as my own).

    Againt, thank you for this great guide!

  • Eduardo Medeiros
    3 years ago

    Great series of tutorials! Thanks to you now I have a properly working mail server (and a web server with PHP as a bonus) on a US$ 5.00 Lightsail instance with 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM, that was already an OpenVPN server: that wouldn’t be possible if your setup wasn’t so light weighted.
    I have just one suggestion to make: if we set the mailbox location to “mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/” (with a trailing slash at the end) instead of the suggested “mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir”, it will be possible to create folders in the mailbox for IMAP use. I believe that without the trailing slash the MBOX format would still be used, is that right?
    And to create the folders I still have to use a shell terminal so I can see them in Outlook, Outlook still doesn’t let me add them using its interface. Is there any way to change this?
    Thank you!

  • Tendai Hove
    3 years ago

    Thank you very much a very informative all in one guide. I followed it to the dot and my email server has been running without any issue for the past 3 months. Now comes Letsencrypt renewal time and i’m struggling to get it to work. The server is an Ubuntu 20.04 Server, Apache 2.4.41 on the latest patch . Running this command:

    certbot certonly --agree-tos --expand --authenticator webroot --installer apache -d mail.georgia.com --webroot-path /var/www/mail.georgia.com/
    

    i keep getting this error:

    The following errors were reported by the server:
    
       Domain: mail.georgia.com
       Type:   unauthorized
       Detail: Invalid response from
       http://mail.georgia.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/Z5rneRT_Whf5ghByn7h-hiRy96h2ttNCahQf_9U8Spw
       [196.241.233.150]: "\n\n404 Not
       Found\n\n

    Not Found

    \n<p"

    Have tried some suggestions on the internet one said i should create a 1234 file under /.well-known/acme-challenge/ and browse to it. That failing with the following error:

    Not Found:   The requested URL was not found on this server
    

    Also tried adding a Directory alias in the virtual host file like:

    
     Alias /.well-known/ /var/www/mail.georgia.com/.well-known/
       
              Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
              AllowOverride None
              Order allow,deny
              allow from all
    

    But i still get the same error. Kindly assist with how i can solve this issue. Thank you.

  • Danran
    3 years ago

    Just to point out to other users (Please correct me if I am wrong here Xiao) who modified the “Auto-create Sent and Trash Folder” section to include “SPECIAL USE”. If your version of dovecot is greater than v2.2.30, according to doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/namespace/#mailbox-settings
    the following bug exists in dovecot:

    “Note:
    Due to a bug in Dovecot v2.2.30+ if special-use flags are used, SPECIAL-USE needs to be added to post-login CAPABILITY response as RFC 6154 mandates. You can do this with imap_capability = +SPECIAL-USE”

    (I believe) To remedy this, you must edit your 20-imap.conf file with “sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/20-imap.conf”, and then change line 38 from “imap_capability = ” to “imap_capability = +SPECIAL-USE”, and then be sure it is uncommented.

    • Danran
      3 years ago

      bahh. I noticed this before I read the entire page 3 instructions. Sorry.

  • Fernando
    3 years ago

    root@Postfix:/etc/nginx/conf.d# sudo certbot certonly -a nginx –agree-tos –no-eff-email –staple-ocsp –email [email protected] -d mail.ferniproyect.es
    Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
    Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer None
    Obtaining a new certificate
    Performing the following challenges:
    http-01 challenge for mail.ferniproyect.es
    Waiting for verification…
    Cleaning up challenges
    Failed authorization procedure. mail.ferniproyect.es (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:dns :: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for mail.ferniproyect.es – check that a DNS record exists for this domain

    IMPORTANT NOTES:
    – The following errors were reported by the server:

    Domain: mail.ferniproyect.es
    Type: None
    Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for mail.ferniproyect.es
    – check that a DNS record exists for this domain
    root@Postfix:/etc/nginx/conf.d#

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      You need to wait for DNS propagation. Check your DNS propagation status at https://dnsmap.io

      • Fernando
        3 years ago

        Thanks for your quick response, I still get the error, I have my DNS server with bind9 from another machine and I have added to the file db.ferniproyect.es the record A mail.ferniproyect.es, even so I still get the same error as before ….
        What can I do?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      3 years ago

      Your DNS record contains a private IP address 192.168.14.2. Delete this IP address from your A record.

  • Mitchell
    3 years ago

    Thanks, this is great. Now, maybe you could write an awesome guide on how to create a reverse proxy to access the webmail feature for those of us that have an Apache webserver already running on a different server, but still want to access our webmail. I assume it is a reverse proxy, that is the only thing hurting me.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      You can install webmail on the Apache web server, so you don’t need a reverse proxy. Webmail and Postfix/Dovecot can run on different hosts.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      If you would like to use a reverse proxy, you can try HAProxy. It can redirect traffic to multiple hosts in the same network.

  • Hugh Zhao
    3 years ago

    Hi Guoan:

    I have spent days trying to figure out my problem and finally stumbled on your posts. First of all, thanks for your efforts!

    Here is my problem: I recently set up an Ubuntu 20.04 mail server using postfix and dovecot. Everything works fine except that my users can not configure their gmail web interface to “send mail as”. During the smtp configuration on web, it complains “Server returned error: “TLS Negotiation failed, the certificate doesn’t match the host., code: 0”. One can configure the smtp with no problem on: Outlook, Thunderbird and gamil app etc. This problem only occurs on gmail web interface.

    So, I checked that syslog and mail log but could not find anything wrong. The only problem I see is when I issue: journalctl -eu dovecot, it spits out:
    pam_unix(dovecot:auth): Couldn’t open /etc/securetty: No such file or directory

    For this error, I could not find a solution. I know in your above A & Q, two people mentioned this error, but the solutions do not apply to my case.

    Could you help me on this? It is appreciated.

    Hugh

    • Yadi Apriyadi
      3 years ago

      Just try this

      sudo cp /usr/share/doc/util-linux/examples/securetty /etc/securetty

  • Cartman
    3 years ago

    Wonderful tutorial! I have a working email server on my VPS.

  • Ezdine G
    3 years ago

    Xiao, is the portion on configuring sieve missing? I would like to redirect spam to the Junk folder, but as configured above spam is rejected by the server. Is this just a matter of installing the dovecot-sieve package and enabling sieve under “plugins” in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/20-lmtp.conf ?

    Thank you!

  • Jim W
    3 years ago

    Great tutorial! Really helping me learn how to set all this up! It’s almost perfect, however I found one thing you missed. You have to disable the 000-default host setup file that also points to the /var/www/html folder. I got an error when I tried generate the TLS cert. But fixed it by disabling the 000-default host file with “a2dissite 000-default” and reloaded apache with “systemctl reload apache2”. I was able to generate the TLS certificate. Might want to add that to the tutorial. I have Webmin installed so not sure if it was put there by Webmin. Or if it just comes with Ubuntu 20.04. But you might want to give it a mention.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Thanks for the tip 🙂

  • I can send and receive email, but Thunderbird requires me to make a security exception, saying my certificate is self-signed (but it’s not!). I followed all the steps, and re-checked my configs several times. In dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf I’m pointed at my letsencrypt cert, but it seems like there’s some other (dovecot?) config, somewhere, overriding my letsencrypt cert. But I searched the dovecot docs and found nothing obvious.

    The only other thing I can think of, I did set up slightly different than your example. My hostname is `myhost.com`. I create `mail.myhost.com`, A and MX records for it, created nginx server block (per your tutorial), restarted all services, rebooted… I’ve even tried several variations, but keep getting the same message saying my mail server is using self-signed cert.

    Any help is appreciated. Thank you so much for all the great tutorials that you curate!!

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      You also need to use Let’s Encrypt certificate in your Postfix configuration (/etc/postfix/main.conf).

  • solartorch
    2 years ago

    a silly question:

    what does [email protected] parameters stand for?

    thank you

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Your own email address. Gmail, outlook, yahoo mail, etc. You can also use your domain email address.

  • Smitty
    2 years ago

    Hello, thank you again for your great tutorials. I’ve noticed a couple of oddities in my build. When sending email from my server, if I use the echo command, email comes in from [email protected], but if I use the mail command, it arrives from [email protected]. Further, when trying to check mail I always get “Cannot open mailbox /var/mail/user: Permission Denied” but permissions appear to be correct. Any suggestions?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      To specify the FROM address, use the following syntax.

      mail -a FROM:[email protected] [email protected]

      The mail command is used only in part 1 to show you Postfix works. The remaining parts of this tutorial series assumes you want to use a graphical email client. If you want to continue to use the mail command, you will need to create a configuration file for mail and adapt the configuration to the remaining parts of this tutorial series.

      For example, mail by default uses the /var/mail/ directory to read emails. However, we configured Dovecot to store emails in ~/Maildir in this article. And they are stored in Maildir format.

      For more info, read the manual

      man mail

      Personally I don’t use mail command anymore. You might think it’s cool to send and read emails from command line, but it doesn’t play well with the remaining parts of this tutorial series.

  • Smitty
    2 years ago

    Also, it seems that external mail coming into the server is never received.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      The mail command by default uses the /var/mail/ directory to read emails. However, we configured Dovecot to store emails in ~/Maildir in this article. That’s why it can’t read incoming emails.

      If you use a graphical mail client like Thunderbird and can’t receive email, please read the troubleshooting tips in this article.

  • RTamas
    2 years ago

    Sadly I did everything as this article, but I can not receive emails from external sources, sending emails locally actually does work 🙁
    All ports are open, MX records set and correct

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      What’s your domain name? I can send an email from my mail server to you and see what’s wrong in your configuration.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Your port 25 is open, but the connection timed out while receiving the initial server greeting, i.e. Your SMTP server doesn’t greet the SMTP client with HELO/EHLO.

      Possible reasons:

      1. You have syntax error in the /etc/postfix/master.cf file and Postfix fails to run properly. In this situation, you can probabaly find the following error in the /var/log/mail.log file.

      fatal: /etc/postfix/master.cf: line number: syntax error
      fatal: daemon initialization failure
      

      You should fix the syntax error in the /etc/postfix/master.cf file.

      2. If you are using SMTP proxy software (such as HAProxy) in front of Postfix SMTP server, it could be that the connection between SMTP Proxy and SMTP server is broken.

      3. There might be another firewall in your network that is interfering with SMTP connection. Check this page: https://success.trendmicro.com/solution/1055808-users-encounter-issues-when-sending-mails-to-some-domains

      • RTamas
        2 years ago

        Thanks for the answer, I’m looking into it

  • Sergio Jara
    2 years ago

    Hello I have done everything and it seems to be receiving and able to send emails but I can’t connect it to an email client.

    When I do try to connect it to an email client it looks like the traffic comes through to my server but nothing happens. Is there a log I can look into for any help?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Follow the instructions in the Troubleshooting Tips section.

      • Sergio Jara
        2 years ago

        I figured it out after weeks of trying. Thank you for an amazing guide.

        My problem was that I didn’t add the email server to my dns resolver in pfSense.

  • Danran
    2 years ago

    When reloading dovecot, I consistently encounter the following error:

    "The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of dovecot.service changed on disk. Run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload units."

    The solution is obvious, but could you explain to my why this keeps happening?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      The answer is obvious. Because you changed the dovecot.service configuration file, so you need to reload systemd.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      That’s not an error. It’s telling you what you should do.

      Every time you change a systemd service unit file, you need to reload systemd (sudo systemctl daemon-reload) for the changes to take effect.

      Just like you need to reload Nginx (sudo systemctl reload nginx) after making changes to Nginx configuration files.

      • Danran
        2 years ago

        I made a post about this on another of your tutorial pages. The thing is, this error kept appearing regardless of the fact that I made no changes. This message appears on every reboot. After much scouring the internet, I have concluded that the restart.conf file is causing this message to appear even after making no changes. Some user on github seem to think this is related to lack of a real time clock, which might make sense. After removing the restart.conf file, the error no longer appears after every reboot. Putting the file back, creates the error once again.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      Did you run the sudo systemctl daemon-reload command after adding the restart.conf file?

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      You can create a systemd service to automatically reload systemd after startup.

      sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/systemd-reload.service

      Add the following lines to this file.

      [Unit]
        Description=Reload systemd after startup
        After=network-online.target
        Wants=network-online.target
      
      [Service]
        Type=oneshot
        ExecStart=systemctl daemon-reload
      
      [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target
      

      Save and close the file. Then enable this service.

      sudo systemctl enable systemd-reload.service --now

      Also, you can set up NTP time sync.

  • William Lau
    2 years ago

    I followed all of your tutorial and added a relay host. But it always land on promotion tab and this is my email test result https://www.mail-tester.com/test-fnaxr8q1g

    Please help.

    • Xiao Guoan (Admin)
      2 years ago

      My advice for avoiding the promotion tab is when your emails are not promotional.

      The Gmail promotion tab is for promotional emails. If you send promotional emails, they will land on the promotion tab.

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