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Prepare your system

Before you run mailcow: dockerized, there are a few requirements that you should check:

Warning

Do not try to install mailcow on a Synology/QNAP device (any NAS), OpenVZ, LXC or other container platforms. KVM, ESX, Hyper-V and other full virtualization platforms are supported. Do not use CentOS 8 with Centos 7 Docker packages. You may create an open relay.

Info

  • mailcow: dockerized requires some ports to be open for incoming connections, so make sure that your firewall is not blocking these.
  • Make sure that no other application is interfering with mailcow's configuration, such as another mail service
  • A correct DNS setup is crucial to every good mailserver setup, so please make sure you got at least the basics covered before you begin!
  • Make sure that your system has a correct date and time setup. This is crucial for various components like two factor TOTP authentication.

Minimum System Resources

Do not use OpenVZ or LXC as guests for mailcow.

Please make sure that your system has at least the following resources:

Resource mailcow: dockerized
CPU 1 GHz
RAM                     Minimum 4 GiB + Swap
Disk 20 GiB (without emails)
System Type x86_64

As of today (29th Dec 2019), we recommend using any distribution listed as supported by Docker CE (check https://docs.docker.com/install/). We test on CentOS 7, Debian 9/10 and Ubuntu 18.04.

ClamAV and Solr are greedy RAM munchers. You can disable them in mailcow.conf by settings SKIP_CLAMD=y and SKIP_SOLR=y.

Firewall & Ports

Please check if any of mailcow's standard ports are open and not in use by other applications:

ss -tlpn | grep -E -w '25|80|110|143|443|465|587|993|995|4190'
# or:
netstat -tulpn | grep -E -w '25|80|110|143|443|465|587|993|995|4190'

Warning

There are several problems with running mailcow on a firewalld/ufw enabled system. You should disable it (if possible) and move your ruleset to the DOCKER-USER chain, which is not cleared by a Docker service restart, instead. See this blog post for information about how to use iptables-persistent with the DOCKER-USER chain. As mailcow runs dockerized, INPUT rules have no effect on restricting access to mailcow. Use the FORWARD chain instead.

**

If this command returns any results please remove or stop the application running on that port. You may also adjust mailcows ports via the mailcow.conf configuration file.

Default Ports

If you have a firewall in front of mailcow, please make sure that these ports are open for incoming connections:

Service Protocol Port Container Variable
Postfix SMTP TCP 25 postfix-mailcow ${SMTP_PORT}
Postfix SMTPS TCP 465 postfix-mailcow ${SMTPS_PORT}
Postfix Submission TCP 587 postfix-mailcow ${SUBMISSION_PORT}
Dovecot IMAP TCP 143 dovecot-mailcow ${IMAP_PORT}
Dovecot IMAPS TCP 993 dovecot-mailcow ${IMAPS_PORT}
Dovecot POP3 TCP 110 dovecot-mailcow ${POP_PORT}
Dovecot POP3S TCP 995 dovecot-mailcow ${POPS_PORT}
Dovecot ManageSieve TCP 4190 dovecot-mailcow ${SIEVE_PORT}
HTTP(S) TCP 80/443 nginx-mailcow ${HTTP_PORT} / ${HTTPS_PORT}

To bind a service to an IP address, you can prepend the IP like this: SMTP_PORT=1.2.3.4:25

Important: You cannot use IP:PORT bindings in HTTP_PORT and HTTPS_PORT. Please use HTTP_PORT=1234 and HTTP_BIND=1.2.3.4 instead.

Date and Time

To ensure that you have the correct date and time setup on your system, please check the output of timedatectl status:

$ timedatectl status
      Local time: Sat 2017-05-06 02:12:33 CEST
  Universal time: Sat 2017-05-06 00:12:33 UTC
        RTC time: Sat 2017-05-06 00:12:32
       Time zone: Europe/Berlin (CEST, +0200)
     NTP enabled: yes
NTP synchronized: yes
 RTC in local TZ: no
      DST active: yes
 Last DST change: DST began at
                  Sun 2017-03-26 01:59:59 CET
                  Sun 2017-03-26 03:00:00 CEST
 Next DST change: DST ends (the clock jumps one hour backwards) at
                  Sun 2017-10-29 02:59:59 CEST
                  Sun 2017-10-29 02:00:00 CET

The lines NTP enabled: yes and NTP synchronized: yes indicate whether you have NTP enabled and if it's synchronized.

To enable NTP you need to run the command timedatectl set-ntp true. You also need to edit your /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf:

# vim /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
[Time]
Servers=0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org 3.pool.ntp.org

Hetzner Cloud (and probably others)

Check /etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg and change the IPv6 interface from eth0:0 to eth0:

# Wrong:
auto eth0:0
iface eth0:0 inet6 static
# Right:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet6 static

Reboot or restart the interface. You may want to disable cloud-init network changes.

MTU

Especially relevant for OpenStack users: Check your MTU and set it accordingly in docker-compose.yml. See 4.1 in our installation docs.