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Starkers
Starkers

Reputation: 10541

Can webmail work without an SMTP server?

Sorry if this is dense. I use Mailchimp for all my emailing needs and have no idea how the mechanics behind it work.

Anyway, I'm looking at this:

http://rainloop.net/docs/installation/.

And the instuctions detail doing three things:

• Extract files from RainLoop Webmail archive and upload those to your server.

• Set correct permissions for files and directories on your server.

• Configure server (apache/nginx) to prevent accessing configuration files via web browser.

Okay...and I'm just confused how it manages to send these emails? All I know is you need to configure SMTP settings in a rails project so it can send emails via an external service like mailchimp...

So how is this working without such a step? Like I say, I use a mail service, but don't know how it intimately works so please don't go overboard when explaining :)

Another example of this witchcraft working without SMTP:

http://xmodulo.com/2014/02/rainloop-webmail-ubuntu-server.html

Upvotes: 0

Views: 650

Answers (1)

David C. Rankin
David C. Rankin

Reputation: 84569

OK, let's see if this will straighten it out. Your install of Rainloop focuses on configuring the web interface for Rainloop. Here is a summary of the steps:

  • Extract files from RainLoop and upload... - This simply places the Rainloop files on your server in a place where users can access them when they type http://yourserver.yourdomain.tld/rainloopdir (or where ever you put the rainloop files so they are accessible)

  • Set correct permission for files, etc... - This tells you to make sure the rainloop files are accessible under your document root and that the file permission are sufficient for reading by the public. The files you want to serve are generally owned by root (or your user or some other user you designate) and are world readable, but not world writeable. (dirs are generally set with chmod 0755 and files with chmod 0644 to accomplish this)

  • Configure server to prevent accessing config files via web browser... - This means that there is usually a directory within Rainloop that holds its configuration. This directory should NOT be accessible from the web, but is generally read/write accessible to the apache user/group for initial setup, then can be read accessible from then on. You can accomplish this 3 different ways (1) set the UID/GID of the config files to the apache user/group. They are generally either 'apache', 'http', or 'www' (openSuSE), or 'wwwuser' on some. After setting the ownership of the config files to (e.g. http:http), you then set the read/write permissions to allow only access by http:http. In other words, these files should not be world readable, so the permissions are generally 0750 for dirs and 0640 for files (or 0660 if Rainloop must write to the files). The second manner of access control is using an a .htaccess file to limit browsing of the config files to the web server itself. The third manner of control is to do the same thing in your httpd.conf file. (the .htaccess file is just a quick way to specify apache config parameters on a per-directory basis without having to alter the httpd.conf file)

Whew.. Now to the smtp issues. -- NO, you generally do not have to configure anything as smtp traffic occurs on standard ports, and rainloop already knows how to communicate with smtp and postfix as long as you don't have them operating on some non-standard ports. See: Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol for information about the port number.

In sum, you should install Rainloop per its instructions, and as long as you have not changed the ports your mail system uses, Rainloop will take care of the rest.

Upvotes: 2

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