Q: I got "Internal server error" when running Open WebMail? I got "can not do setuid" error? I got "Software error: Can't locate etc/openwebmail.conf in @INC" error? A: There are many possible answers... 1. Please check you have installed a complete set of perl 5.005 or above. And You uncompress the openwebmail-1.xx.tgz with proper parameter. It should be "tar -zxvBpf openwebmail-1.xx.tgz" 2. Your openwebmail scripts may have wrong owner or mode. The permission of openwebmail.pl, openwebmail-main.pl, openwebmail-prefs.pl, checkmail.pl, spellcheck.pl should be mode=4555 owner=root group=mail 3. Your perl may be compiled with suid ability disabled. a. check if you have a executable of suidperl, then 'chmod 4555 suidperl' and change #!/usr/bin/perl to the path of this suidperl b. Or recompile your perl with suid enabled 4. The MIME::Base64 or CGI module on your system may be too old a. install MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz b. install CGI.pm-2.74.tar.gz ps: In most cases, you can run the './openwebmail.pl' in text terminal to get more information about the error. Q: I got "Can't check filesystem of script "./openwebmail.pl" for nosuid"? A: Your openwebmail may be installed on a filesystem mounted nosuid. Please remove the nosuid parameter from /etc/fstab or install openwebmail to other filesystemm. ps: 'man mount' for more information about nosuid Q: The login menu showed okay, but I always got login failure? A: Check auth_module option in openwebmail.conf: If it is 'auth_unix.pl', check if $unix_passwdfile and $unix_passwdmkdb in auth_unix.pl are correct If it is 'auth_pam.pl', make sure you have followed the instructions of 'PAM SUPPORT' in readme.txt. If you still got login failure, you can debug the pam module by: 1. modify auth_pam.pl uncomment all the lines of log_time(...) 2. login to openwebmail 3. check the /tmp/openwebmail.debug for more information. Q: I got "Couldn't open XXX-session-0.370606494136155!" error after login? A: You openwebmail-1.xx.tgz was uncompressed with improper parameter. It should be "tar -zxvBpf openwebmail-1.xx.tgz" Q: I got "Software error: Can't locate MIME/Base64.pm in @INC"? A: Please download MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz and install cd /tmp tar -zxvf MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz cd MIME-Base64-2.12 perl Makefile.PL make make install Q: I got "can't open /var/log/openwebmail.log" error? A: Please check the openwebmail.log permission, it should be owner=root, group=mail, mode=660 Q: The 'From' field of my message contained only 'username@'? A: You may has wrong setting of domainname in openwebmail.conf 1. For version older than 1.41 , please be sure to use '' for a text string of hostname or use `` for the program (ex: /bin/hostname) 2. For version 1.50 or above, please list all domainnames seperated with comma. or use auto for this setting, openwebmail will call '/bin/hostname' to get the fqdn of your host. Q: How can I use multiple virtual domains with openwebmail? A: First, you have to decide if you want to let user defines multiple from email address by themself. If yes, set 'enable_setfromemail' to 'yes', else set it to 'no' Second, you have to decide if you want to let user pick up the domainname from all domainnames supported by your mail server or you want to statically specify domainname used by each user. To let user to pick doaminname from all supported domainnames, you have to specify all domainnames in the option 'domainnames' in openwebmail.conf. To statically specify domain name used by each user, you have to define the mappping from email address to userid in /etc/mail/virtusertable. For example, a line like below guest@virtual.com guest will make the user guest using the domainname 'virtual.com' Q: What happens if users with same usernames exist in different domains? A: You have to create different accounts for each user. For example, you have 3 users with name 'john': john@company1.com, john@company2.com and john@company3.com. You need to create 3 accounts for these 3 johns and mapping the 3 email address to the created accounts in /etc/mail/virtusertable john@company1.com john1 john@company2.com john2 john@company3.com john3 Then user can login with full email address, ex: 'john@company1.com'. Q: If user login with only username instead of full email address, which user is choosed in above case? A: Since openwebmail is unable determine which user is the right one, it will return 'no such user'. But if there is only one virtual user john defined in /etc/mail/virtusertable john@company1.com john1 The john@company1.com will be choosed even user logins with only 'john' Q: What happens if a real userid 'john' exists in above case? A: Openwebmail will choose real userid 'john' first. But if the /etc/mail/virtusertable tables is defines as below john@company1.com john Then john@company1.com will be choosed. Q: Some of my messages were moved to trash folder automatically? A: Your messages were either filtered by 'global filter rule' or 'faked smtp message filter'. Global filter will filter messages with know virus attachments. The global filter rules are defined in the file global_filterbook (global_filterbook is defined as %ow_etcdir%/global_filterbook in openwebmail.conf.) The 'faked smtp message filter' will filter messages that have a faked smtp source, those messages are often from spammers. 'faked smtp filter' is default enabled and can be changed in openwebmail.conf. The user can also disable it in the user preference. Q: What are "messages with faked smtp"? A: In short, they are messages coming from mail servers that fake their name from other machines. Where is a message coming from? A message sent from machine A to machine B may have 2 cases: a. A ---> M1 ---> M2 ---> B (M1, M2 are mail servers) In this case, openwebmail use M1 as the from server. Since most of the time, A is windows machine using outlook. b A -------------------> B In this case, openwebmail use A as the from server. How do we know if a from server fakes his name? Each host may have 3 names in the mail header: $byas - name used by this server when saying hello to incoming connection $relay - name used by this server when relaying mail through other host $connectfrom - ip and name detected by other hosts resolved from DNS system when receiving connection from this server A from host is faking his name if a. $byas doesn't equal to $relay, and b. $connectfrom doesn't equal to $relay, and c. $connectfrom has different domain than the desition server B, and d. $connectfrom is not private IP Q: I still want the filtered messages, how can I disable faked smtp filter completely? A: 1. Set default_filter_fakedsmtp to 'no' in openwebmail.conf This will unset the default fakedsmtp filter for all newly created user 2. Uncheck the faked smtp filter option in user preference This will disable the fakedsmtp filter for a specific user Q: I could not add attachments? Open WebMail was hanged when I pressed the 'add' button to add attachments? A: 1. Your CGI or MIME-Base64 module may be too old, Please download CGI.pm-2.74.tar.gz and MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz in http://turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw/openwebmail/download/packages/ and install them to your system. 2. Your proxy may limit the size of a POST request. Try to add attachments with no proxy setting in your browser. If you are the administrator of the squid proxy server, please set the request_body_max_size option to a larger value. Q: Attachments disappeared when I forwarded a message? A: Check permission of the following directories cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc - owner=root, group=mail, mode=755 cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions - owner=root, group=mail, mode=770 cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/users - owner=root, group=mail, mode=770 Q: The permission of cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc is correct but attachments still disappeared in message forwarding? A: Hmmm, please upgrade to the latest version. Some old version(1.03,1.04) has little problem in attachment handling. Q: When I checked 'edit folder menu', I found some folders were empty but took disk space? A: The disk space occupied by a folder shown in 'edit folder menu' includes the size of a folder and its index. Though folder is empty, the folder index still has some data structure to maintain. Q: When I clicked 'spell check' button, I got "Internal Server error" in new window? A: Please be sure that you have installed ispell-3.1.20.tar.gz Q: Ispell has been correctly installed, but spellcheck still doesn't work? A: The spellcheck in old version of openwebmail doesn't work on RedHat 7.x, please upgrade your openwebmail to the latest version. Q: Why is spellcheck.pl a suid root program? A: Because it needs to read the preference file, ~/mail/.openwebmailrc, of different users to get their langage and dictionary setting. Q: I have problems in reading some mail.... A: please check http://turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw/openwebmail/download/doc/changes.txt to see if any update fixes your problem and download the openwebmail-current.tgz Q: I got 'Sorry, there was a problem sending your message' error? A: please check if sendmail option in openwebmail.conf has pointed to correct program, it is normally /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail. ps:If you are using postfix as an replacement for sendmail, you have to use its compatiable wrapper 'sendmail' instead of 'postfix'. Also remember to change the mode of main.cf of postfix to 644, thus it could be read by all users. (thanks to Rex_Chen, rex@ispro.com.tw) Q: The message sent from me has warning message like: 'X-Authentication-Warning: myhostname : apache set sender to ....' A: This is due to the effective user that openwebmail runs as is not trusted by sendmail. This effective user is actually inherited from httpd. In above example, the effective user is 'apache', so add 'Tapache' to sendmail to the 'Trusted users' session in your sendmail.cf ps: If you has followed the guide in readme.txt and added 'Tnobody' to sendmail.cf, please remove it if your httpd runs as other user Q: The autoreply function doesn't work? A: An incoming message won't be replied by vacation.pl if 1. the destinated username has entries defined in /etc/alias which causes the mail routed to another account without calling vacation.pl 2. the destinated username doesn't not appear as an recipient in To: or Cc: 3. this message is sent by the destinated username himself If your message is not in the above 2 cases, please be sure that vacationinit and vacationpipe in openwebmail.conf have pointed to the path where the vacation program is. If the path is correct, you can do debug with the -d option 1. choose a user, enable his autoreply in openwebmail user preference 2. edit the ~user/.forward file, add the '-d' option after vacation.pl 3. send a message to this user to test the autoreply 4. check the /var/tmp/vacation.debug for possible error information Please add this '-d' parameter to the vacationpipe in openwebmail.conf. vacationpipe /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/vacation.pl -d -t60s Then send a testing mail to someone who enabled the autoreply. The debugging information will be written into /var/tmp/vacation.debug. Q: When I enable autoreply feature, others get "Returned mail: see transcript for details" instead of my autoreply message? A: Your sendmail may be configured with Sendmail Restricted SHell or smrsh. vacation.pl file needs to be added to smrsh. If you are using RedHat 7.1, you may link vacation.pl to /etc/smrsh/ cd /etc/smrsh ln -s /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/vacation.pl /etc/smrsh/vacation.pl (thanks to Emir Litric, elitric@yahoo.com) Q: My SENT folder shows -1 or other negative message size rather then regular message size? A: This problem occurs if you installed Open WebMail on the same partition where quota is enabled. Open WebMail uses temp files in cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions folders. Solution is to move sessions folder to another partition with no Quota. Please read RedHat-README.txt for detailed explanation on setting up this, since this problem mostly occurs on RedHat Linux 6.2 and bellow. (thanks to Emir Litric, elitric@yahoo.com) Q: My openwebmail was okay, but I got "Your request didn't contain the proper session ID cookie -- access denied!" in these days? A: Openwebmail puts user uploaded attachments in cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions/ temporarily. User will get error if there is no space left on the partion where cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions/ lives or user has exceeded his disk quota. Please move cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions to a larger parition with diskquota disablaed, then create a symbolic link to that new directory cd /new_place mkdir sessions chmod 770 sessions chown 0 sessions chgrp mail sessions cd yourweb_cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/ rm -Rf sessions ln -s /new_place/sessions . Q: The Open WebMail is very slow on my machine? A: It depends on how you define the "slow". The response time of Open WebMail in normal operation would be: 6 second on a p133 machine. 3 second on a p200mmx machine. 1 second on a celeron300 machine. ps: Some operations would take more time than normal operation, for example: indexing on a large folder, adding large attachment to a message. It is recommended that you install Open WebMail on a medium-sized machine. (ex: Celeron 300 with 128MB ram). Actually it runs well on a pentium 200mmx machine only if you have enough ram installed. There is an analysis of memory usage of Open WebMail available at http://turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw/openwebmail/download/doc/memory.usage Q: How can I upgrade from old version of Open Webmail? A: Each version of openwebmail is made to be backward compatible with old ones, no user setting or mail message will be lost after upgrade. The upgrade steps: 1. make a copy of your old openwebmail.conf 2. install new openwebmail in the same location as old version 3. update the new openwebmail.conf with the setting in old one. Q: How can I report problem? A: If your Open WebMail doesn't work, please post your problem on openwebmail forum http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=108433 with the following information OS Perl Version your openwebmail.conf the ls -l of the perl executable used in your openwebmail.pl the ls -l of your cgi-bin/openwebmail and cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc the ls -la of the ~user/mail/ the error message in your browser If your Open WebMail works but it shows strange output for some messages, please forward the message as an attachment to us (openwebmail@turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw) ps: clicking the 'forward as attachment' icon in message reading menu Q: Can I call openwebmail from my programs with username/password specified? A: You can call the openwebmail with url http://server/openwebmail.pl?action=login&loginname=USER&password=PASS But this is a little dangerous since the loginname and password will be displayed at the URL line of the user's browser. Q: How can I set an alias or link to the openwebmail script so users can type in a shorter url? A: Please create a file, index.html, like below. Either a or b is okay. Than put this index.html to the location mapped by the url you want. a. ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- b. --------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- Q: Does Open WebMail support maildir and vpop3mail user by Qmail? A: No, It doesn't. Q: Will Open WebMail support maildir and vpop3mail used by Qmail? A: Maybe, but it won't be implemented in the near future since we don't use qmail on our mail server. It is said that qmail has a 'mbox' compatible mode, you may use that mode with openwebmail. Q: Can Open WebMail be used with mod_perl? A: No, lots of code needs to be changed to make Open WebMail a good behavior program under mod_perl. Currently, it can not be used with mod_perl. Q: Can I use Open WebMail in a commercial web site? A: Yes. Open WebMail is GPLed software (please see copyright.txt for detail of GPL). You can distribute/use/modify it freely only if a. the GPL Copyright page must be kept untouched. b. any improvement of Open WebMail or any product based on Open WebMail must be released to the public for free if it is not for internal use. c. products based on Open Webmail must be also distributed under GPL. ps: We would be happy if you mail us a message that your commercial web site is using Open WebMail. It may be put into the web page as some kind of advertisements :) 11/22/2001 openwebmail@turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw