docs/Servers/Email/Mailcow.md

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to illustrate how to deploy Mailcow in a dockerized format.

!!! note "Assumptions" It is assumed that you are deploying Mailcow into an existing Ubuntu Server environment. If you are using a different operating system, refer to the official documentation.

Setting Up Docker

Go ahead and set up docker and docker-compose with the following commands:

sudo su # (1)
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | CHANNEL=stable sh # (2)
apt install docker-compose-plugin # (3)
systemctl enable --now docker # (4)

1. Make yourself root.
2. Install Docker
3. Install Docker-Compose
4. Make docker run automatically when the server is booted.

Download and Deploy Mailcow

Run the following commands to pull down the mailcow deployment files and install them with docker. Go get a cup of coffee as the docker compose pull command may take a while to run.

!!! note "Potential Docker Compose Issues" If you run the docker-compose pull command and it fails for some reason, change the command to docker compose pull instead. This is just the difference between the plugin version of compose versus the standalone version. Both will have the same result.

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
cd mailcow-dockerized
./generate_config.sh # (1)
docker-compose pull # (2)
docker-compose up -d

1. Generate a configuration file. Use a FQDN (host.domain.tld) as hostname when asked.
2. If you get an error about the ports of the nginx-mailcow service in the docker-compose.yml stack, change the ports for that service as follows:

   ports:
     - "${HTTPS_BIND:-0.0.0.0}:${HTTPS_PORT:-443}:${HTTPS_PORT:-443}"
     - "${HTTP_BIND:-0.0.0.0}:${HTTP_PORT:-80}:${HTTP_PORT:-80}"
   

Login to Mailcow

At this point, the Mailcow server has been deployed so you can log into it at the following urls:

Administrators: You can now log in as an administrator using the default credentials admin and the password moohoo at: https://${MAILCOW_HOSTNAME}/admin

Regular Mailbox Users: Continue logging in at the usual URL: https://${MAILCOW_HOSTNAME} (FQDN only)