Be Technical by Techniques

Gmail IMAP lets you download messages from Gmail’s servers onto your computer so you can access your mail with a program like Microsoft Outlook Express or Apple Mail, even when you aren’t connected to the Internet.

This article will provide instructions for setting-up Gmail with SquirrelMail.

There may be some scenarios when we do not want to use the regular Gmail interface. If your domains is configured to use “Google Apps” for email service then you can easily setup SquirrelMail for seamless integration with you portal. It can also be used if regular Gmail (http://mail.google.com) is blocked by your firewall administrator

Installation Steps:

1. Confirm that IMAP is enabled (see details here)

2. 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

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

cd squirrelmail-1.4.13
./configure

If you do not have SSH access then copying “config/config_default.php” as “config/config.php” will also work (thanks Martin).

4. 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/';

5. 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>

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

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

Run this command as “root” if SELinux is enabled.

setsebool httpd_can_network_connect true

How can I verify if SELinux is enabled?
This is a typical response on non-SELinux system. Try it on your’s and you’ll know it.

id -Z

Make appropriate changes for cPanel based hosting (very popular shared hosting platform).

Please drop a comment if you find it useful.

Cheers,
Sudhaker