SquirrelMail Webmail Installation on CentOS

Linux Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Email Client Tools - Mail User Agents (MUA)

∟SquirrelMail Webmail Installation on CentOS

This section provides a tutorial example on how to install SquirrelMail on CentOS computers as a Web-based email client tool.

What Is SquirrelMail? SquirrelMail is a free open source Web-based email client tool for Linux systems that integrates to Postfix and Dovecot local servers. It includes built-in pure PHP support for IMAP and SMTP, and renders all pages in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has strong MIME support and a flexible plugin system.

The latest stable version is SquirrelMail 1.4.22, which seems to be outdated (released in 2011). So I decided to try the "stable version snapshot" version, SquirrelMail 1.4.23-svn, released in 2020.

1. Go to SquirrelMail Website at http://squirrelmail.org.

2. Click "Download" from the left menu. You see the download page.

3. Click "squirrelmail-20201119_0200-SVN.stable.tar.gz" to download it.

4. Unzip and un-tar the download file. You see the ./squirrelmail.stable/squirrelmail sub-directory.

5. Install SquirrelMail on the web server. Remember to backup the old Webmail HTML directory, if exists.

herong$ sudo mv /var/www/html/mail /var/www/html/mail-old

herong$ sudo mv ./squirrelmail.stable/squirrelmail /var/www/html/mail

6. Fix ownership and security context.

herong$ cd /var/www/html

herong$ sudo chown -R root mail
herong$ sudo chgrp -R root mail
herong$ sudo chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t mail

7. Test installation by open http://192.168.1.100/mail/doc/ in a Web browser. You see SquirrelMail documentations. Read the "INSTALL - Installation instructions" page.