Postfix is a popular open-source Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that can be used to route and deliver email on a Linux system. It is estimated that around 25% of public mail servers on the internet run Postfix.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how to get up and running quickly with Postfix on an Ubuntu 16.04 server.
In order to follow this guide, you should have access to a non-root user with sudo
privileges. You can follow our Ubuntu 16.04 initial server setup guide to create the necessary user.
In order to properly configure Postfix, you will need a Fully Qualified Domain Name pointed at your Ubuntu 16.04 server. You can find help on setting up your domain name with DigitalOcean by following this guide. If you plan on accepting mail, you will need to make sure you have an MX record pointing to your mail server as well.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume that you are configuring a host that has the FQDN of mail.example.com
.
Postfix is included in Ubuntu’s default repositories, so installation is incredibly simple.
To begin, update your local apt
package cache and then install the software. We will be passing in the DEBIAN_PRIORITY=low
environmental variable into our installation command in order to answer some additional prompts:
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo DEBIAN_PRIORITY=low apt-get install postfix
Use the following information to fill in your prompts correctly for your environment:
mail.example.com
, but we probably want to set the system mail name to example.com
so that given the username user1
, Postfix will use the address user1@example.com
.root@
and postmaster@
. Use your primary account for this. In our case, sammy.To be explicit, these are the settings we’ll use for this guide:
If you need to ever return to re-adjust these settings, you can do so by typing:
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix
The prompts will be pre-populated with your previous responses.
When you are finished, we can now do a bit more configuration to set up our system how we’d like it.
Next, we can adjust some settings that the package did not prompt us for.
To begin, we can set the mailbox. We will use the Maildir format, which separates messages into individual files that are then moved between directories based on user action. The other option is the mbox format (which we won’t cover here) which stores all messages within a single file.
We will set the home_mailbox
variable to Maildir/
which will create a directory structure under that name within the user’s home directory. The postconf
command can be used to query or set configuration settings. Configure home_mailbox
by typing:
- sudo postconf -e 'home_mailbox= Maildir/'
Next, we can set the location of the virtual_alias_maps
table. This table maps arbitrary email accounts to Linux system accounts. We will create this table at /etc/postfix/virtual
. Again, we can use the postconf
command:
- sudo postconf -e 'virtual_alias_maps= hash:/etc/postfix/virtual'
Next, we can set up the virtual maps file. Open the file in your text editor:
- sudo nano /etc/postfix/virtual
The virtual alias map table uses a very simple format. On the left, you can list any addresses that you wish to accept email for. Afterwards, separated by whitespace, enter the Linux user you’d like that mail delivered to.
For example, if you would like to accept email at contact@example.com
and admin@example.com
and would like to have those emails delivered to the sammy
Linux user, you could set up your file like this:
contact@example.com sammy
admin@example.com sammy
After you’ve mapped all of the addresses to the appropriate server accounts, save and close the file.
We can apply the mapping by typing:
- sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
Restart the Postfix process to be sure that all of our changes have been applied:
- sudo systemctl restart postfix
If you are running the UFW firewall, as configured in the initial server setup guide, we’ll have to allow an exception for Postfix.
You can allow connections to the service by typing:
- sudo ufw allow Postfix
The Postfix server component is installed and ready. Next, we will set up a client that can handle the mail that Postfix will process.
Before we install a client, we should make sure our MAIL
environmental variable is set correctly. The client will inspect this variable to figure out where to look for user’s mail.
In order for the variable to be set regardless of how you access your account (through ssh
, su
, su -
, sudo
, etc.) we need to set the variable in a few different locations. We’ll add it to /etc/bash.bashrc
and a file within /etc/profile.d
to make sure each user has this configured.
To add the variable to these files, type:
- echo 'export MAIL=~/Maildir' | sudo tee -a /etc/bash.bashrc | sudo tee -a /etc/profile.d/mail.sh
To read the variable into your current session, you can source the /etc/profile.d/mail.sh
file:
- source /etc/profile.d/mail.sh
In order to interact with the mail being delivered, we will install the s-nail
package. This is a variant of the BSD xmail
client, which is feature-rich, can handle the Maildir format correctly, and is mostly backwards compatible. The GNU version of mail
has some frustrating limitations, such as always saving read mail to the mbox format regardless of the source format.
To install the s-nail
package, type:
- sudo apt-get install s-nail
We should adjust a few settings. Open the /etc/s-nail.rc
file in your editor:
- sudo nano /etc/s-nail.rc
Towards the bottom of the file, add the following options:
. . .
set emptystart
set folder=Maildir
set record=+sent
This will allow the client to open even with an empty inbox. It will also set the Maildir
directory to the internal folder
variable and then use this to create a sent
mbox file within that, for storing sent mail.
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Now, we can test the client out.
The easiest way to create the Maildir structure within our home directory is to send ourselves an email. We can do this with the mail
command. Because the sent
file will only be available once the Maildir is created, we should disable writing to that for our initial email. We can do this by passing the -Snorecord
option.
Send the email by piping a string to the mail
command. Adjust the command to mark your Linux user as the recipient:
- echo 'init' | mail -s 'init' -Snorecord sammy
You should get the following response:
OutputCan't canonicalize "/home/sammy/Maildir"
This is normal and will only show during this first message. We can check to make sure the directory was created by looking for our ~/Maildir
directory:
- ls -R ~/Maildir
You should see the directory structure has been created and that a new message file is in the ~/Maildir/new
directory:
Output/home/sammy/Maildir/:
cur new tmp
/home/sammy/Maildir/cur:
/home/sammy/Maildir/new:
1463177269.Vfd01I40e4dM691221.mail.example.com
/home/sammy/Maildir/tmp:
It looks like our mail has been delivered.
Use the client to check your mail:
- mail
You should see your new message waiting:
Outputs-nail version v14.8.6. Type ? for help.
"/home/sammy/Maildir": 1 message 1 new
>N 1 sammy@example.com Wed Dec 31 19:00 14/369 init
Just hitting ENTER should display your message:
Output[-- Message 1 -- 14 lines, 369 bytes --]:
From sammy@example.com Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969
Date: Fri, 13 May 2016 18:07:49 -0400
To: sammy@example.com
Subject: init
Message-Id: <20160513220749.A278F228D9@mail.example.com>
From: sammy@example.com
init
You can get back to your message list by typing h:
- h
Outputs-nail version v14.8.6. Type ? for help.
"/home/sammy/Maildir": 1 message 1 new
>R 1 sammy@example.com Wed Dec 31 19:00 14/369 init
Since this message isn’t very useful, we can delete it with d:
- d
Quit to get back to the terminal by typing q:
- q
You can test sending mail by typing a message in a text editor:
- nano ~/test_message
Inside, enter some text you’d like to email:
Hello,
This is a test. Please confirm receipt!
Using the cat
command, we can pipe the message to the mail
process. This will send the message as your Linux user by default. You can adjust the “From” field with the -r
flag if you want to modify that value to something else:
- cat ~/test_message | mail -s 'Test email subject line' -r from_field_account user@email.com
The options above are:
-s
: The subject line of the email-r
: An optional change to the “From:” field of the email. By default, the Linux user you are logged in as will be used to populate this field. The -r
option allows you to override this.user@email.com
: The account to send the email to. Change this to be a valid account you have access to.You can view your sent messages within your mail
client. Start the interactive client again by typing:
- mail
Afterwards, view your sent messages by typing:
- file +sent
You can manage sent mail using the same commands you use for incoming mail.
You should now have Postfix configured on your Ubuntu 16.04 server. Managing email servers can be a tough task for beginning administrators, but with this configuration, you should have basic MTA email functionality to get you started.
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Thanks for the guide Justin, however I’ve messed up somewhere at this step
It tells me there’s not such file or directory and I’ve tried to restart the console and now I cannot enter any commands just a blank line. Whatever I type in and press enter, it comes out 2 times.
Stuck on
Can't canonicalize "/home/miguel/Maildir"
Can’t see to get any farther. When I runls -R ~/Maildir
I getls: cannot access '/home/miguel/Maildir': No such file or directory
when I run command
and then its had error:
so I install mailutils. But when I run snorecord again its show problem
I using ubuntu 17.x
any help ?
I’m still unable to figure out what’s wrong… I’ve tried all the steps many time but stuck at
Can't canonicalize "/home/sammy/Maildir"
After running
echo 'init' | mail -s 'init' -Snorecord sammy
I getCan't canonicalize "/home/sammy/Maildir
Andls -R ~/Maildir
returnsls: cannot access '/home/sammy/Maildir': No such file or directory
And
mail
returnsHappening this again and again…
How to fix this?
Hi, Is it necessary to install dovecot after postfix ? And is there a tutorial to install dovecot on 16.04 ? Thank you.
Very useful (The best explanation I’ve read here) and the only one who worked for me, maybe because the Ubuntu version, all tutorials are quite same but they are Ubuntu’s 14 or minus.
Can you add Courier/Dovecot setup please? Same, for Ubuntu 16.04
Thank you
After following this tutorial, I was able to send email to my other domain email such as contact[@]otherdomain.com but I was getting error as authentication required when I was sending an email to my gmail account… Adding txt record as value “v=spf1 mx a ip4:DropletIP” fixed the issue… But still email goes directly in the spam box…
PS: Do replace DropletIP with your droplet ip such as; 123.0251.12.235 PPS: You can check errors by this command: sudo tail /var/log/mail.log
at the point :
$ echo ‘init’ | mail -s ‘init’ -Snorecord sammy
all I got was
Command ‘mail’ not found, but can be installed with: apt install mailutils
I tried that… it didn’t work… flattened the droplet started again… obviously I done something wrong. Tried again and got the same… gave up made a coffee. Went off looking for another solution.
May this link can help if you have trouble with create Maildir https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17468109/postfix-unable-to-find-etc-postfix-virtual-file
Guys, I was stuck at
ls -R ~/Maildir
step. I confirmed I was non root user with sudo access, I did found a typo error onhome_mailbox
, had named ithome-mailbox
. **** me.