To reproduce the latest setup of my email server and being able to work on this series of posts as promised months ago, I created a new LXC container with Debian Wheezy first. As LXC is not part of this series, no further details about it are provided here.

Like always, the first thing to do on a brand new machine is checking for the latest updates:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

First we need to install a mail transfer agent (MTA), which in our case will be Exim. As some enhanced capabilities, such as SASL authentication are required, the Debian package exim4-daemon-heavy must be installed:

apt-get install exim4-daemon-heavy

Given that we are going to manually create an Exim configuration from scratch later, answers to configuration related questions during the installation process are irrelevant to this setup.

Now that our machine has an MTA installed, MySQL server can be installed:

apt-get install mysql-server

Hint: If you try to installed MySQL server before an MTA is installed, Debian might choose an other MTA than Exim to fulfill MySQL’s requirements. This may lead to additional, unnecessary steps or even a configuration conflict that you would have to resolve when installing Exim.

After that, Dovecot can be installed with the following command:

apt-get install dovecot-core dovecot-mysql dovecot-lmtpd dovecot-imapd dovecot-sieve dovecot-managesieved

Additionally to the more or less obvious packages dovecot-mysql, dovecot-lmtpd and dovecot-imapd, the packages dovecot-sieve and dovecot-managesieved are also installed, so that server-side filtering based on Sieve is possible. Roundcube has some great plugins to create and manage Sieve filter rules.

Talking about Roundcube: This is the last of piece we have to install, before we can glue everything together. Though I generally prefer distribution packages, I mostly end up with installing software manually when in comes to web applications. As Roundcube is written in PHP, we need web server that is capable of executing PHP scripts. For simplicity we choose Apache plus the appropriate PHP 5 module in this howto:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

That’s it for the first step. All required software is installed, so we can proceed with the configuration of each in the next step.