Installing Inboxen on OpenBSD

Inboxen is a self-hosted email server that allows you to manage your own email accounts. Here is a step-by-step guide to install Inboxen on OpenBSD.

Pre-requisites

Before you begin with the installation, please ensure that you have the following pre-requisites:

  • An OpenBSD system with root access
  • An internet connection
  • Basic knowledge of OpenBSD commands

Installation Guide

Follow the below steps to install Inboxen on OpenBSD:

  1. Update the package repository of OpenBSD by running the following command:
pkg_add -u
  1. Install the required packages using the below command:
pkg_add nginx p5-Mail-IMAPClient p5-MIME-EncWords p5-Email-Address p5-Email-MIME p5-Email-Reply p5-Email-Sender p5-Email-Valid postfix dovecot
  1. Create a separate user for Inboxen and set a password for them. You can use the below command to create a new user.
adduser inboxen
  1. Download the latest version of Inboxen package from the official website https://inboxen.org/ using the following command:
cd /usr/local/
wget https://github.com/dickfonc/inboxen/archive/v3.2.2.tar.gz
  1. Extract the tar file using the command:
tar -zxf v3.2.2.tar.gz
  1. Rename the extracted folder to inboxen and move to /var/www directory.
mv inboxen-3.2.2 inboxen
cd /var/www
mv /usr/local/inboxen .
  1. Set the proper ownership and permissions for the inboxen directory.
chown -R inboxen:inboxen inboxen
  1. Edit the nginx configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and add the below code snippet.
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your-server-name;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}
  1. Save the configuration file and restart Nginx service using the following command:
/etc/rc.d/nginx restart
  1. Create a folder to store the email data using the following command:
mkdir /var/vmail/
chown -R vmail:dovecot /var/vmail/
  1. Enable and start the postfix and dovecot services.
rcctl enable postfix
rcctl enable dovecot
rcctl start postfix
rcctl start dovecot
  1. To set up the initial configuration for Inboxen, copy the file inboxen.json.example to inboxen.json using the below command:
cp /var/www/inboxen/config/inboxen.json.example /var/www/inboxen/config/inboxen.json
  1. Edit the inboxen.json configuration file to configure the email server settings, and add users by running the following command:
vi /var/www/inboxen/config/inboxen.json
  1. Finally, start the Inboxen service using the following command:
cd /var/www/inboxen && su inboxen -c "env MOJO_MODE=production hypnotoad -F '/var/www/inboxen/script/inboxen'"

Conclusion

You have successfully installed Inboxen on OpenBSD. Now you can manage your own email accounts using this self-hosted email server.