Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mavericks Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers.
As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at every meal for spammers. Here, the evil spammers must also read every piece of spam ever sent for eternity. By the end (aka Ragnarok), they should have the chemically induced stamina of a 16 year old with the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, enough pills of other types to not be able to use that stamina, plenty of African princes looking to donate large sums of money if only they can be helped out of their country (which should cost about 100,000 compared to a 5,000,000 payout, not a bad ROI, right?!?!?), have their conflicting stamina situation at the top of the search engines and of course, have lost all of the money made from their African princes due to getting their credit card hijacked by about 9,000 phishing scams. All in all, a special kind of hell…
But back to the point of the article, setting up mail. The things that mail administrators need to focus on to keep that mail server flowing mail to and from everyone else in the world:
Once all of that is taken care of (I’ll add more as I think about it) then it’s time to enable the mail service in Server app 3. Actually, first let’s setup our SSL certificates. To do so, open the Server app and click on Certificates in the SERVER section of the sidebar. Here, use the “Secure services using” drop-down list and click on Custom… for each protocol to select the appropriate certificate to be used for the service.
Click OK when they’re all configure. Now let’s enable the mail service (or outsource mail). To do so, open the Server app and click on Mail in the SERVICES list in the sidebar.
At the configuration screen is a sparse number of settings:





Once you’ve configured the settings for the Mail service, click on the ON slider to enable the service. At this point, you should be able to telnet into port 25 of the host to verify that SMTP is listening, preferably from another mail server:
telnet mail.krypted.com 25
You can also check that the mail services are running using the serveradmin command along with the fullstatus option for the mail service:
sudo serveradmin fullstatus mail
Which returns with some pretty verbose information about the service, including state, connections, running protocols and the rest of the following:
mail:startedTime = ""
mail:setStateVersion = 1
mail:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:protocol = "IMAP"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:service = "MailAccess"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:0:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:protocol = "POP3"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:service = "MailAccess"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:protocol = "SMTP"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:service = "MailTransferAgent"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:2:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:kind = "OUTGOING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:protocol = "SMTP"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:service = "MailTransferAgent"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:3:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:status = "OFF"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:protocol = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:service = "ListServer"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:4:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:protocol = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:service = "JunkMailFilter"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:5:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:protocol = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:service = "VirusScanner"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:6:error = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:status = "ON"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:kind = "INCOMING"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:protocol = ""
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:state = "STOPPED"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:service = "VirusDatabaseUpdater"
mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:7:error = ""
mail:logPaths:Server Error Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/mail-err.log"
mail:logPaths:IMAP Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log"
mail:logPaths:Server Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log"
mail:logPaths:POP Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log"
mail:logPaths:SMTP Log = "/var/log/mail.log"
mail:logPaths:List Server Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/listserver.log"
mail:logPaths:Migration Log = "/Library/Logs/MailMigration.log"
mail:logPaths:Virus Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/clamav.log"
mail:logPaths:Amavisd Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/amavis.log"
mail:logPaths:Virus DB Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/freshclam.log"
mail:imapStartedTime = ""
mail:postfixStartedTime = ""
mail:servicePortsRestrictionInfo = _empty_array
mail:servicePortsAreRestricted = "NO"
mail:connectionCount = 0
mail:readWriteSettingsVersion = 1
mail:serviceStatus = "DISABLED"
To stop the service:
sudo serveradmin stop mail
And to start it back up:
sudo serveradmin start mail
To configure some of the settings no longer in the GUI from previous versions, let’s look at the full list of options:
sudo serveradmin settings mail
One that is commonly changed is the subject line added to messages that are marked as spam by spam assassin. This is stored in mail:postfix:spam_subject_tag, so changing would be:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:spam_subject_tag = "***DIEEVILSPAMMERSDIE*** "
A number of admins also choose to disable greylisting, done using the mail:postfix:greylist_disable option:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:greylist_disable = no
To configure an email address for quarantined mail to go, use mail:postfix:virus_quarantine:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:virus_quarantine = "diespammersdie@krypted.com"
The administrator, by default, doesn’t get an email when an email containing a file infected with a virus is sent through the server. To enable this option:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:virus_notify_admin = yes
I also find a lot of Mac environments want to accept email of pretty much any size. By default, message size limits are enabled. To disable:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:message_size_limit_enabled = yes
Or even better, just set new limit:
sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:message_size_limit = 10485760
And to configure the percentage of someone’s quota that kicks an alert (soft quota):
sudo serveradmin settings mail:imap:quotawarn = 75
Additionally, the following arrays are pretty helpful, which used to have GUI options:
The client side of the mail service is straight forward enough. If you are wondering where in this article we discuss using webmail, er, that’s not installed by default any longer. But the open source project previously used, roundcube, is still available for download and easily installed (the pre-reqs are all there, already). Check out the roundcube wiki installation page here for more info on that. Also, mail groups. I hope to have a post about that soon enough. Unless, of course, I get sidetracked with having a life. Which is arguably not very likely…
krypted October 23rd, 2013
Posted In: Kerio, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server
Tags: blacklist, Configure Mail Service, greylist, IMAP, Kerio, Mac OS X Server, mavericks, Mavericks Server, OS X Server, POP, postfix, roundcube, server.app, smtp, smtpd, use ISP, whitelist
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