Homepage of Sudhaker Raj

Friends,

I am listing steps required for setting up SquirrelMail to work with Gmail IMAP. This is especially useful when you like SquirrelMail or don’t have access to regular http://mail.google.com You can even use it to brand your custom domain hosted at Google Apps and seamlessly integrate it your portal (if you can afford, consider buying Google’s Premium Edition which comes with API access at $50/user/year).

Steps:

Create a place holder for SquirrelMail and unpack the latest distribution

mkdir -p /home/squirrel/data/attachments
cd /home/squirrel/
chown -R apache.apache data
tar zxvf ~/downloads/squirrelmail-1.4.13.tar.gz

Configure the installation (do nothing simply save and quit).

cd squirrelmail-1.4.13
./configure

Append following lines into /home/squirrel/squirrelmail-1.4.13/config/config_local.php

$domain = ‘gmail.com’;
// IMAP settings
$imapServerAddress = ‘imap.gmail.com’;
$imapPort = 993;
$use_imap_tls = true;
$imap_auth_mech = ‘login’;
// SMTP settings
$smtpServerAddress = ’smtp.gmail.com’;
$smtpPort = 465;
$use_smtp_tls = true;
$smtp_auth_mech = ‘login’;
// Special folder setting
$trash_folder = ‘[Gmail]/Trash’;
$sent_folder = ‘[Gmail]/Sent Mail’;
$draft_folder = ‘[Gmail]/Drafts’;
// Attachment
$data_dir = ‘/home/squirrel/data/’;
$attachment_dir = ‘/home/squirrel/data/attachments/’;
// Optional -
$provider_name = ‘Gmail alternative by Sudhaker’;
$provider_uri = ‘http://sudhaker.com/’;

Create an alias in apache /etc/httpd/conf.d/squirrel.conf

Alias /sq “/home/squirrel/squirrelmail-1.4.13″
<Directory “/home/squirrel/squirrelmail-1.4.13″>
AllowOverride AuthConfig
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Verify the setup by browsing to ${site_url}/sq/

User Id: example@gmail.com (or user@example.com)
Password: email_password

Please make appropriate changes for cPanel based hosting (shared hosting).

Please follow following step if SELinux is enabled.

[root@centos ~]# setsebool httpd_can_network_connect true

Please drop a comment if you find it useful.

Cheers,
Sudhaker