#mailcow — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mailcow, aggregated by home.social.
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RE: https://red.fox.yt/@coltofox/117171580672580504
This is finally resolved as of 2:20am last night after hours of migrating 18 domains, 34 mailboxes, 196 aliases, 1 distribution list, and 6 forwarders from Zimbra ZCS FOSS to mailcow. I'll note my technical journey down below if you're interested.
:blobfoxcomfycomputer:
This has been ongoing effort since the compromise last Friday with investigations into some solutions.
I thought about building Zimbra from source then stopped myself from the nightmare of management overhead of maintaining that.
So I looked at the directly compatible platform, Carbonio. I spun up a Rocky 10 VM to replace this (Rocky 9 is EOL next year so can't do that). I managed to get Carbonio EL9 installed on Rocky 10 but couldn't get the post-install script to run since it required Perl 5.32 when EL10 ships with Perl 5.40. I tried installing EL9 Perl but there were too many dependencies, then I tried Perlbrew but it would keep trying the system one regardless of the symlinks I'd try -- even tried using the system one but it didn't budge either.
So dependency hell kicked in and I thought, well maybe they have a docker container. So I installed docker on the Rocky 10 VM, got that all setup. But then I look at the Docker Hub page and while an image does exist, there is zero documentation anywhere and the last image was 8 months ago. So I lost confidence there.
Through the investigation on this journey of migrating away off of Zimbra Open Source I kept seeing references to mailcow. So I tried a demo of mailcow to grasp the platform. The demo didn't really convince me to like it, I still prefer the UI Zimbra had (especially the admin UI) but it seemed it could almost do everything I needed.
So I eventually got the mailcow docker containers up and running. The migration was a lot of busywork since I didn't really want to touch the old Zimbra Database.
I migrated every mailbox one-by-one, creating the accounts all from scratch then did the (imap)sync afterward. The aliases were a bit easier, I could grep a zmprov command on the old server to query a user then paste them into mailcow in bulk.
Then there was DNS... For the public BIND servers I could sed the MX and SRV records to the new hostname but I still had to enter and split up 18 DKIM records. Had to manually update some Cloudflare domains, then also all of the internal (split) DNS records too.
Then there was TLS... So I haven't completely finished this yet, but it's enough for mail transport. I can't use mailcow-acme because it doesn't support RFC 2136 so I had to look into manual certificates (still ACME, but OS level). Then I had to find out how I could handle 18 different domains in SNI instead of 1 giant certificate. Turned out this was possible, and I've configured the default domain (that the hostname uses). I still need to configure the other 17 domains but the groundwork is there for when I get around configuring all those autoconfig/autodiscover certs.
With that out of the way, the main migration completed. Some systems recognised the new server as the same one after I put in the CNAME from old to new. Some didn't and I'm gradually fixing those as I find them (stricter auth requirements, etc).
One thing I will say I like about mailcow is Exchange ActiveSync. Zimbra always kept that as a paid feature. This finally enables me to have push notifications and proper calendar sync. I noticed there was a note last year from the SOGO team that they planned to remove ActiveSync, I'm so glad they reversed that decision.
After almost a week with almost no email I see how important this server actually is. I installed Zimbra ZCS roughly 5 years ago to exit Google Workspace and I'm still glad I did.
Having control over the data directly is empowering to not have some big corporation feeding it into their AI models with a force opt-in approach (i.e. Google) or alternatives with questionable political views (i.e. Proton). Keep email decentralised!
Anyway, I'm happy I have email again now. Thanks for reading! :blobfoxheart:
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Comment quitter les GAFAM : Mails, contacts, calendriers (ep 3)
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Comment quitter les GAFAM : Mails, contacts, calendriers (ep 3)
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@[email protected] The last time I went to RightsCon was in 2011! Feels like an eon ago, but looking through all my old emails many of the same themes came up then too.
(so glad I moved off gmail and consolidated all my email accounts going back 25+ years on my self-hosted #mailcow server! thank you @doncow for providing this incredible product!)
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@[email protected] The last time I went to RightsCon was in 2011! Feels like an eon ago, but looking through all my old emails many of the same themes came up then too.
(so glad I moved off gmail and consolidated all my email accounts going back 25+ years on my self-hosted #mailcow server! thank you @doncow for providing this incredible product!)
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@[email protected] FYI @doncow would be good to get more #mailcow users into these calls, contributing to the direction of SOGo, the webmail that ships with mailcow.
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@[email protected] FYI @doncow would be good to get more #mailcow users into these calls, contributing to the direction of SOGo, the webmail that ships with mailcow.