Horde webmail

Following on from my last piece, today we're going to setup webmail using horde.

My previous webmail software was squirrelmail. It worked very well, but it was also very basic. I'd seen horde, and it did look pretty darn sexy so I started there this time around.

I downloaded horde groupware webmail edition, as this version is meant to be prepackaged and easier to roll out for specifically webmail related use.... which is what I needed.
Reading through the docs/INSTALL was a bit daunting, and it really suggested that hoard requires a proper database backend such as mysql... which was really a bit more configuration than I wanted for a simple webmail platform. Oh well.

I installed apache2, php5, mysql5 using yast.
Upon starting mysql for the first time it helpfully warned me about the default mysql security, and that the user accounts needed tidying up, which I did.

Setting up the apache vhost next was dead easy! I just can't believe how easy it was compared to previous attempts.
Suse provides a very well documented template in /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/vhost.template, and it worked first try.

I next ran the horde configure script from ./scripts/setup.php.
For some reason I ran into issues creating the initial mysql database using the script, so I had to manually pump the mysql setup script into mysql using
mysql -u root -p******* < /srv/www/vhosts/horde/scripts/sql/create.mysql.sql

With that done I was able to run the setup script again to simply to create the tables (rather than the initial DB too). This worked fine.

The default horde mysql access is using a preset username and password pair, so using the mysql command line I went into mysql and created a user account specifically for horde to use, with a different password.
Finally I reran the configure script again to use the new username.

The login worked correctly. As it happens my imap server is on localhost and presumably that's where horde looks for it, which is fortunate as I wasn't asked about that at any time. It's probably in an easy to change file somewhere though.

And that's horde. Day to day use and configuration is something I'm sure you can work out on your own :)