Apache2, Postfix, Dovecot & Roundcube

For the past two days I’ve tirelessly configured Packetscape for e-Mail services. I admit I was conceited coming into it, I figured any HOWTO guide sourced via google would be sufficient instructions, alas I was wrong.

Through a few failed initial attempts and a few orphaned packages I stumbled upon this tutorial referenced from the http://postfix.org site. The guide was a step by step, from base to finish, install of: Postfix, Dovecot & Roundcube on a Debian (squeeze/lenny) system.

The tutorial was quite intuitive and mostly easy to follow. I did however, run into a few snags, particularly during the Dovecot configuration portion. Either my brain wasn’t switched on or the documentation was too ambiguous.  During this section the author instructs the administrator to modify the file with a few directives (sic) allowing the daemon to interface with Postfix. I made the changes to the config file and restarted the Dovecote daemon. Every time I would get a syntactical error. Plagued by this issue I trawled the Googles looking for a solution, each one I found, more obscure and non-related than the last.
I managed to get it working eventually. I copy and pasted exactly the commented out config-directives in the guide underneath each other and edited the values accordingly.

If any of you reading are embarking on this voyage I would give this advice:

• Read the comments section from the tutorial website: There was one particular comment which noted that the Roundcube package the author recommended will never work with this particular system configuration. I had to run an apt-get install roundcube-mysql command to get the right one.
• Use Notepad++ or similar IDE: This tool was awesome for troubleshooting the erroneous syslog messages as they referenced line numbers that were malfunctioning; of which Notepad++ keeps track of.
• Copy & Paste: Copying and pasting the relevent config sections within the default config file made sure that the syntax was parsed properly.

All up the experience was an eye opener, I learnt a lot about Unix mail services, reading documentation and perseverance.