QMail + vpopmail + Courier-IMAP + DSPAM + mySQL + roundCube

Also known as: How I wasted several days of my life

Here's what I wanted: A secure, reliable and resource-efficient (you'll laugh at this part later) mail system with an effective spam filter that is easy enough to train that I'll actually use it, and a nice webmail system. All playing together nicely.

And that's exactly what I got.

Before you start, I should warn you that QMail, vpopmail and my custom scripts are all very closely tied together. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt to a different IMAP server, configure this without SQL or DSPAM or use a different webmail package, but if you're trying to use something besides QMail and vpopmail, you may as well just stop reading now as these instructions probably wont help much.

The Materials

• QMail - Despite the fact that I agree with many people that Dan J. Bernstein is an arrogant ass, I don't see this as a reason to avoid his excellent products, of which QMail is one of them, so I'm using QMail.
• vpopmail - A lot of my initial experience with QMail was from the qmailrocks.org guide, which uses vpopmail. I've just never had any need to try and find a replacement, so I used vpopmail.
• Courier-IMAP - Again, this is what I started with and what has always worked well for me, so I stick with it.
• DSPAM - This is what got this WHOLE THING STARTED. I found a good review of this somewhere and thought "Hey, that looks pretty good, I should try it!" and then tried to integrate it into my mail system. -.- I guess I shouldn't be too annoyed, though, it's definitely been working well for me.
• mySQL - I always like to pretend I'm setting up a mail system for a huge user base like an ISP or something. It makes me feel special. So I configured the whole thing to use mySQL to make it easier to write my own web-based admin tools.
• roundCube - I love roundCube, it's a fantastic webmail client and the only free AJAX one I could find last I looked, so it won by default.
• PHP - Don't need Apache or anything, just a command line PHP binary to run my custom scripts, because I'm awesome and I write everything in PHP.
• FreeBSD - I think Linux is a useless piece of shit and that FreeBSD is infinitely better. I haven't really tried these instructions on anything but FreeBSD, so you Linux guys are on your own.

The Glue

All this stuff just didn't magically work together. I ended up writing a bunch of very poor scripts to integrate DSPAM into the whole mix and make it nice and user friendly.

I may or may not ever finish this. If you want a copy of the scripts I wrote for doing this, or have any specific questions, feel free to email or call me from the main page of this site and I'll be happy to give you a hand.