Mailcow

On this site, you will find a step-by-step guide on how to run the mail server Mailcow on CloudPanel.
The mail server Mailcow is a dockerized application that is addressed via Reverse Proxy.

System Requirements

• >= 1 Core
• >= 6 GB of RAM
• >= 20 GB Disk

Disable Postfix

Login via SSH as root and stop and disable the postfix service:

systemctl stop postfix && systemctl disable postfix

Docker Installation

1. Login via SSH as root:

ssh root@instance-ip-address

2. Install Docker with Docker Compose with the following command:

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Install docker and the docker compose plugin:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | CHANNEL=stable sh && apt install docker-compose-plugin

Debian 11 LTS

1. Install apparmor first as a workaround for the following issue.

apt update && apt -y install apparmor

2. Install docker and the docker compose plugin:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | CHANNEL=stable sh && apt install docker-compose-plugin

Mailcow Installation

1. Clone the Mailcow Git Repository to /opt/mailcow-dockerized:

git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized /opt/mailcow-dockerized

2. Initialize Mailcow by executing the generate_config.sh script:

cd /opt/mailcow-dockerized/ && ./generate_config.sh

3. Set the Mail server hostname (FQDN), e.g., mail.domain.com.

4. Open the configuration file and change the values for HTTP_PORT, HTTP_BIND, HTTPS_PORT, HTTPS_BIND.

nano /opt/mailcow-dockerized/mailcow.conf

HTTP_PORT=7080
HTTP_BIND=127.0.0.1

HTTPS_PORT=7443
HTTPS_BIND=127.0.0.1

Starting Mailcow

To start Mailcow, we go to the directory /opt/mailcow-dockerized/ and launch the docker containers.

cd /opt/mailcow-dockerized/ && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Reverse Proxy Configuration

To access Mailcow via our domain https://mail.domain.com, we create a Reverse Proxy and forward the traffic to port 7443.

1. In CloudPanel, create a Reverse Proxy with your Domain Name and https://127.0.0.1:7443 as Reverse Proxy Url.

2. Go to your Reverse Proxy and issue an SSL/TLS Certificate.

3. Done. You can now login https://mail.domain.com with the username admin and password moohoo.

4. For security reasons, we recommend putting a Basic Authentication in front of your Mailcow installation.