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Prepare Your System

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

Warning

When running mailcow: dockerized on a Debian 8 (Jessie) box, you should switch to kernel 4.9 from Jessie backports to avoid a bug when running Docker containers with healthchecks! For more details read: github.com/docker/docker/issues/30402

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 stuff like two factor TOTP authentication.

Minimum System Resources¶

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

Resource	mailcow: dockerized
CPU	1 GHz
RAM	2 GiB + Swap (better: 4 GiB + Swap)
Disk	5 GiB (without emails)
System Type	x86_64

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:

# netstat -tulpn | grep -E -w '25|80|110|143|443|465|587|993|995'

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 already up and running 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 wether 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.