If you have ever needed to develop a web application you have probably needed to send email from the application. Frequently in the applications I work on, we end up using the email address as the login, which means we need lots of email addresses for unit test and integration testing, etc. Using real email addresses for this is not very convenient, so we have used a separate development mail server. Ideally this mail server will accept mail from any development machine, but will not relay mail to any real addresses (so it won’t be an open relay).

Up until now we have used a Windows mail server for this purpose but we are in the process of converting much of our infrastructure to linux servers. So I needed to set something up on CentOS 6.3. After a little research and a few pointers from the fine denizens of the #centos IRC chat room on freenode.net, I settled on using postfix.

Postfix was already installed on my server, so all I needed to do was configure it to answer for a virtual mailbox on a fake domain. First we need a user and corresponding group to own the mailboxes, as well as a directory to hold them:

groupadd --system --gid 2525 vmail

useradd --system --uid 2525 \

        --comment "Virtual Mailbox Owner" \

        --shell /sbin/nologin \

        --home /var/mail/vhosts \

        --no-user-group -g vmail vmail

mkdir /var/mail/vhosts

mkdir /var/mail/vhosts/example.com

chown -R vmail:vmail /var/mail/vhosts

I am using vmail as the user and group and example.com for the fake domain.

Next we have some changes to the /etc/postfix/main.cf configuration file

# Allow postfix to listen on all IP addresses

inet_interfaces = all

#inet_interfaces = localhost



# Configure postfix to only accept mail for itself and never relay

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = reject_unauth_destination



# VIRTUAL DOMAINS

# See /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.6.6/README_FILES/VIRTUAL_README

virtual_mailbox_domains = example.com

virtual_mailbox_base = /var/mail/vhosts

virtual_mailbox_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/vmailbox

virtual_uid_maps = static:2525

virtual_gid_maps = static:2525

Next we need to set up users and passwords. Since we are dealing with a simple development server, we do not need anything too robust like an RDBMS. We’ll just use postfix’s ability to create and use Berkeley databases. Also, we want to create a bunch of generic accounts, so we’ll use a script:

cd /etc/postfix

# Create accounts userN@example.com for N from 1 to 20

for i in $( seq 1 20 )

do

    echo -e "user${i}@example.com\texample.com/user${i}/Maildir/" >>vmailbox

done

# Compile the database and reload the server

postmap /etc/postfix/vmailbox

postfix reload

# We need a restart because we changed the listen IP address

service postfix restart

Now we can test our configuration by using telnet to send some mail. Connect to postfix via telnet localhost smtpand send an email directly. Use the following example as a guide:

220 youserver.localdomain ESMTP Postfix

EHLO YOURSERVER

250-youserver.localdomain

250-PIPELINING

250-SIZE 10240000

250-VRFY

250-ETRN

250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES

250-8BITMIME

250 DSN

MAIL FROM:user1@example.com

250 2.1.0 Ok

RCPT TO:user2@example.com

250 2.1.5 Ok

DATA

354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>

Subject:Testing email



This is a test of postfix of our postfix configuration.

.

250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 16CAE260A1D

QUIT

221 2.0.0 Bye

Connection closed by foreign host.

Be sure to check /var/log/maillog to ensure the mail is actually delivered. You may want to just open a terminal and tail -f /var/log/maillog for the rest of the way. You’ll also want to check that postfix created mail files for user2 under /var/mail/vhosts/example.com.

Before we get to the other side of the equation, reading email, we should configure our firewall to allow other machines to connect via SMTP and IMAP. First run iptables -L --line-numbers to determine the current state of your firewall and determine the number of the last rule. You’ll need to change the rule numbers below to that number and one more than that number. You’ll also want to change the --source argument to match your LAN.

iptables --insert INPUT 11 \

         --match state \

         --state NEW \

         --protocol tcp \

         --destination-port smtp \

         --source 10.0.0.0/24 \

         --jump ACCEPT

iptables --insert INPUT 12 \

         --match state \

         --state NEW \

         --protocol tcp \

         --destination-port imap \

         --source 10.0.0.0/24 \

         --jump ACCEPT

iptables -L --line-numbers

Test your firewall configuration by trying the telnet session from another machine. If everything is working as desired, save configuration via service iptables save, otherwise rollback with service iptables restart.

Now we need an IMAP server so that we can read email. I chose to use dovecot. I needed to install it using the following:

yum install dovecot

chkconfig --levels 2345 dovecot on

Next we configure dovecot to use a simple password file. Again, we don’t need anything fancy and all users will have the same unoriginal password, password. Modify /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf, changing lines as follows:

disable_plaintext_auth = no

#!include auth-system.conf.ext

!include auth-passwdfile.conf.ext

Tell dovecot where the mailboxes are by editing /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf:

mail_location = maildir:/var/mail/vhosts/%d/%n/Maildir

Next modify /etc/dovecot/conf.d/auth-passwdfile.conf.ext:

passdb {

  driver = passwd-file

  args = /etc/dovecot/%d-passdb

}



userdb {

  driver = static

  args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/var/mail/vmail/%d/%n

}

Create the password file /etc/dovecot/example.com-passdb using the script

cd /etc/dovecot

for u in $( cut -f1 /etc/postfix/vmailbox )

do

    echo -e "${u}:{PLAIN}password" >>example.com-passdb

done

#

# Now start dovecot; it shares the /var/log/maillog with postfix so continue

# to monitor that log file

service dovecot start

You should be able to connect to your server using an IMAP client like Thunderbird. (Recent versions of Thunderbird seem to want to try to discover the configuration itself, just abort that and configure it by hand.) Note you’ll need to use the full email address, user1@example.com, for the login.

Now simply configure your new web application to use your server as the SMTP server. As long as it only ever tries to send mail to example.com addresses, you should be set.