Mail-in-a-box is self hosted mail server

Mail in a box Transactional Email Service

Free Software To Use As Email Service Provider

Mail-in-a-Box is a self-hosted on-premise Mail Server Software. Setup your own email service with no technical expertise like making your own Gmail.

Mail-in-a-box helps you setup your own gmail

Mail in a box

GitHub

Overview

There was a time when email service was only provided by the large ISPs and it was a tedious job to manage mail servers. But over the time different Mail Server Software with advanced features made it possible to establish public email services such as Gmail and Hotmail.

Mail-in-a-Box made it super easy to setup your own email service without any technical knowledge or expertise. Technically it can turn any computer in the cloud into a fully functional mail server. Its like any other service provider but with your full control from top to bottom.

Its super easy to administer an email server by a clean and simple web based administration portal. Using Mail-in-a-Box as its quite obvious even with the name that the software is designed to work out of box without any requirement of extra configurations. Its like a one click email setup. It just works out of box.

Mail-in-a-Box offers a webmail and supports IMAP/SMTP which makes it super easy to sync across your mobile devices. It also supports contacts and calendar synchronization. It comes with HTTPS TLS support and generates and renews certificates automatically using Let’s Encrypt which is a free SSL certificate provider.

Mail-in-a-Box also supports and admin RESTful API which makes it very easy for you to perform administration operations like adding new email accounts or suspending and existing email account through some external dashboard.

Email has been struggling recently due the problems of spamming and all the major public email services have to integrate dedicated spam filtering software to help their users see only what’s important. Mail-in-a-Box supports spam filtering and greylisting which means you don’t have to worry about spam. It also includes automatic DNS configuration

System Requirements

To setup Mail server using Mail-in-a-Box, you must have the following requirements.

  • Ubuntu 14.04 64bit VPS (Fresh installation).
  • 768MB RAM or more. 1GB is recommended.
  • 30GB or more Hdd free space.
  • Add proper MX records in your DNS server.
  • If your mail server is behind a firewall/Router, you should allow the following ports: 22 (SSH), 25 (SMTP), 53 (DNS; must be open for both tcp & udp), 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), 587 (SMTP submission), and 993 (IMAP).

Features

Following are the key features of Mail-in-box

  • Automatic DNS configuration
  • Spam filtering.
  • Greylisting.
  • Backups to Amazon S3, static website hosting.
  • Free TLS (SSL) certificates from Lets Encrypt.
  • Host mail for multiple users and multiple domain names.

Installation Instructions

SSH into your new VPS. Use the IP address that you took note of earlier.

$ ssh <span id="cloaka4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.</span><script type="text/javascript">document.getElementById('cloaka4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2').innerHTML='';var prefix='&#109;a'+'i&#108;'+'&#116;o';var path='hr'+'ef'+'=';var addya4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2='r&#111;&#111;t'+'&#64;';addya4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2=addya4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2+'203'+'&#46;'+'0'+'&#46;'+'113';var addy_texta4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2='r&#111;&#111;t'+'&#64;'+'203'+'&#46;'+'0'+'&#46;'+'113';document.getElementById('cloaka4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2').innerHTML+='<a '+path+'\''+prefix+':'+addya4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2+'\'>'+addy_texta4f93424eca46d7662dcbc069e04d0e2+'<\/a>';</script>.0

Your root user password can be found in the Vultr control panel, in the Overview section.

Copy and paste the following into your terminal.

$ curl -s https://mailinabox.email/setup.sh | sudo bash

Several Ubuntu packages will now be installed for you. Eventually, you’ll be asked a few installation questions:

  • Your email address This will default to something like This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.document.getElementById(‘cloak72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef’).innerHTML=’’;var prefix=’ma’+‘il’+’to’;var path=‘hr’+‘ef’+’=’;var addy72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef=’me’+’@’;addy72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef=addy72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef+’example’+’.’+‘com’;var addy_text72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef=’me’+’@’+’example’+’.’+‘com’;document.getElementById(‘cloak72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef’).innerHTML+=’<a ‘+path+’'’+prefix+’:’+addy72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef+’'>’+addy_text72fb41072db45cd32c9bc696829496ef+’</a>’;. Change that to whatever you prefer.
  • Hostname This should default to the hostname that you have already set up for your VPS, for example box.example.com. Leave this as-is.
  • Configuring tzdata Select your timezone.
  • Password Finally, you’ll be asked to enter a new password. This will be used for your new email account, as well as logging into the admin interface.

Once installation is complete, you’ll be presented with a success message, and a website link to the admin interface.

Your Mail-in-a-Box is running.

Please log in to the control panel for further instructions at:

https://203.0.113.0/admin

You will be alerted that the website has an invalid certificate. Check that
the certificate fingerprint matches:

C0:9B:FF:04:2B:2D:8F:47:5A:BF:82:E9:F2:2A:E8:CB:51:F3:12:88:48:6B:9E:72:7C:33:8B:D5:88:B7:05:D3:4B:6C:22:80:5F
 English