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Install iRedMail on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS

System Requirements

Warning

iRedMail is designed to be deployed on a FRESH server system, which means your server does NOT have mail related components installed, e.g. MySQL, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, etc. iRedMail will install and configure them for you automatically. Otherwise it may override your existing files/configurations althought it will backup files before modifying, and it may not be working as expected.

To install iRedMail on RHEL or CentOS Linux, you need:

Preparations

Set a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) hostname on your server

No matter your server is a testing machine or production server, it's strongly recommended to set a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) hostname.

Enter command hostname -f to view the current hostname:

$ hostname -f
mx.example.com

On RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux, hostname is set in two files:

HOSTNAME=mx.example.com

For RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux 7, hostname is defined in /etc/hostname.

mx.example.com
127.0.0.1   mx.example.com mx localhost localhost.localdomain

Verify the FQDN hostname. If it wasn't changed, please reboot server to make it work.

$ hostname -f
mx.example.com

Disable SELinux.

iRedMail doesn't work with SELinux, so please disable it by setting below value in its config file /etc/selinux/config. After server reboot, SELinux will be completely disabled.

SELINUX=disabled

If you prefer to let SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing, you can set below value instead:

SELINUX=permissive

Disable it immediately without rebooting your server.

# setenforce 0

Enable yum repositories for installing new packages

NOTE: Since official RHEL/CentOS and EPEL repositories don't have all required packages with the needed features, iRedMail team has built these packages and made them available trough the iRedMail repository enabled by default at installation time. You can view all available packages here, please check README and ChangeLog files under each directory for more details. Source RPMs (srpm) used by iRedMail team to build the binary packages are available here.

Download the latest release of iRedMail

# cd /root/
# tar xjf iRedMail-x.y.z.tar.bz2

Start iRedMail installer

It's now ready to start iRedMail installer, it will ask you several simple questions, that's all required to setup a full-featured mail server.

# cd /root/iRedMail-x.y.z/
# bash iRedMail.sh

Note to Chinese Users

Our domain name iredmail.org has been blocked in mainland China for years (since Jun 04, 2011), please run command below to finish the installation:

IREDMAIL_MIRROR='http://42.159.241.31' bash iRedMail.sh

Additional variables are:

Screenshots of installation:

Note

There's no big difference between available backends, so it's strongly recommended to choose the one you're familiar with for easier management and maintenance after installation.

To MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL users

If you choose to store mail accounts in MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL, iRedMail installer will generate a random, strong password for you. You can find it in file iRedMail.tips.

Note: This account is an admin account and a mail user. That means you can login to webmail and admin panel (iRedAdmin) with this account, login username is full email address.

After answered above questions, iRedMail installer will ask you to review and confirm to start installation. It will install and configure required packages automatically. Type y or Y and press Enter to start.

Important things you MUST know after installation

The weakest part of a mail server is user's weak password. Spammers don't want to hack your server, they just want to send spam from your server. Please ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS force users to use a strong password.

Access webmail and other web applications

After installation successfully completed, you can access web-based programs if you choose to install them. Replace your_server below by your real server hostname or IP address.

Get technical support

All documents are available in BitBucket repository, and published under Creative Commons license. You can download the latest version for offline reading. If you found something wrong, please do contact us to fix it.