The hosting business I run on the side to my actual job has the odd client wanting their own mailing system. I set up a postfix/dovecot system on our VM not too long ago and it’s been slowly building up into an actual workable system. We have had some issues regarding a PHP exploit and some spam but that’s an ongoing pain in the arse and another story altogether.
One of the obvious problems with hosting your own mail server is; how do people actually see their mail? We offer IMAP and SMTP support so they can plug in their own clients but what if they want an actual interface? Well there are a number of pre-made solutions, which are just websites which hook into your internal (or remote) mailing system. We decided to go with Roundcube, comes with its own online installer, needs MySQL and some extra PHP functions but it’s well documented and the install process is fairly easy – we set up roundcube for 3 systems, including myself.
The problem came when I tried to set up roundcube for our 4th client, I realised that fundamentally there was no difference in terms of the backend, despite using their own URLs they all resolve to the same location and the site itself was identical, save for 1 or two configs. They were also all using individual databases (belonging to their sites) and it dawned on me that I had the same table setups across 4 databases for no particular reason…
I decided to downsize and force everybody to use the same client. I started with a new setup of Roundcube and made backups of the data (not the schema/table structure) from every clients individual database and compiled into one script. The user ID’s need to be manually amended (obviously each domains users started from 1) but thankfully in total we had about 11 users so it wasn’t difficult to go down the list and change the ID’s.
Since we use virtualhosts on our sites, and I wanted to enable the mail portal for every site, the easiest thing to do was create an Alias file. An Alias will redirect any traffic for a particular argument to a specified destination. For example, I wanted every site with a /Mail url to navigate to our the new Roundcube installation. So I created the following file
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/Mail.conf $ Alias /newmail /var/www/Mail Alias /Mail /var/www/Mail Alias /mail /var/www/Mail #EOF service httpd restart
This enabled any site we host to be redirected to the roundcube installation whenever they used any of the alias’ specified. for example http://mycustomdomain.com/Mail
Then it was just a matter of making the configs unique. The easiest way to do this that I’ve found is to use PHP’s $_SERVER attribute to detect basic information like which URL has been used to access the site, then to use this information to assign values in the config. You can set Roundcube to pass in the Username and Password from the logged in user for SMTP auth when they try to send, and by default they try to login via IMAP so users are properly authenticated. As I said before you can use PHP to detect the URL which is being used to access the page, so in the config file itself you can just set a number of parameters into an array, then load these in while the config is being read. As in the code below taken from my config.inc.php file in the Roundcube Config directory
//Now some fancy scripting to set the logo based on the domain viewing the page
$CustomerArray= array();
$CustomerArray[] = array("domain" => "vandebilt.co", "logo" => "http://vandebilt.co/Archive/images/joelogowhite.png");
$CustomerArray[] = array("domain" => "anotherdomain.co.uk", "logo" => "http://anotherdomain.co.uk/logo-250.png");
for ($i = 0; $i < COUNT($CustomerArray); $i++)
{
//If the URL being used to view the site contains the domain name
if (strpos($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"],$CustomerArray[$i]["domain"]) !== false)
{
$config['skin_logo'] = $CustomerArray[$i]["logo"];
$config['product_name'] = $CustomerArray[$i]["domain"] . ' Webmail';
}
}
You can expand the array to hold as many config items as you like per domain, then during the loop load them in as the site parameters. So if I were to access the site vandebilt.co/Mail I would see my own logo, then if I were to access anotherdomain.co.uk/Mail, I would see their logo. This gives the users the impression that they have their own webmail portal, but it is in fact just the same site with some very basic config hacks to make it seem like their own. This lets us downsize on server space, share plugin configurations, only need to debug one site and ultimately support it better.
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