Exchange is dead!

Exchange to iRedMail.

Following on from a previous post: Running a home email server in 2021

Introduction

So as per some of the previous posts. I am a true believer that if you have the skills to host your own mail server. You probably should. Historically, I have been using Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 for this. But I did come into a few issues with exchange that prompted me to move off it. 

Problems

The problems I faced were mainly based on the fact the Microsoft Exchange is kind of no longer supported. This is mainly because everyone is moving over to exchange online or other hosted solutions. This lead to a lack of documentation and resources that eventually made my other issues unsolvable.

The first problem I had always had, but it never caused a problem. This was that active-sync did not auto discover. This meant that I had to define all the server details every time I wanted to connect a new client. This was not a big deal as once it was done. It worked fine.

The 2nd problem I had was that sometimes mail would take a while to sync to my devices. I never got to the bottom of this issue.

The 3rd issue is what killed exchange for me. One day the server decided to no-longer accept any mail and left no traces to why.

Unfortunately due to unexpected life events. I did not have the time to sit and troubleshoot it, I just needed to get my mail flowing again. So I had to move over to a new solution quickly.

Choosing a new solution

So now I had to choose what I wanted to move my mail over to. As you may already know. I am a big fan of Linux systems and a Linux based system was on the cards. I also wanted something that was ARM powered as I can then run it on low powered hardware and then just go with it.

I have been learning how to configure postfix for some time now but I had never been able to fully configure a server for use. So I needed some help.

I turned to iRedMail. This is a script based installer for: Postfix, Dovecot, Spam Assassin and few more options. These can be ever ran from OpenLDAP or An SQL database. I chose to go with the LDAP backed setup. This will become apparent later.

Installation

So the installation process, like any other of my server projects. Started with a fresh install of Debian Buster on a virtual machine running on my ESXi Raspberry Pi.

Once installed you then have to install both OpenLDAP and MariaDB. These two backends are what we will run our mail services on. 

Next we run the iRedMail installer script from the website. This is very easy to follow, so I won’t go too much in detail about it. Once the installer had finished it was running. I just had to setup my users.

I then had to login to the iRedAdmin panel and add the domains and users here. This admin panel is very useful as it creates all the objects in LDAP easily and it takes seconds.

Once done. I moved my port forwarding rules to the new machine.

Moving the mailbox content

Moving mail data is sometimes considered to be quite tricky. But I take a simple approach to this. I simply load up both mailboxes in Outlook and then drag and drop from old to new. 

I truly believe that this approach is very reliable as you can see if there are any sync issues and resolve them as you go.

Going live

To make the system live. All I had todo now is move my devices over to the new mailbox. This was very easy. However I found that the Outlook app for iOS would not accept my new account. I opted to go back to the apple mail app. It works perfectly. 

iRedMail Pro

Let’s take a minute to talk about iRedMail pro. Quite frankly I think the £400 odd pounds a year is a rip off considering your using open sourced software to run your mail. They do offer the documentation to achieve everything that the pro version can but directly from your backend. All I needed todo that was outside the free version was add aliases. I could do this from phpLDAPadmin. 

I do understand that you get support included with this. But it is still overpriced. If they offered a pro version that was cheaper without support, I might be interested.

Addressing the Elephant on the post

So if your an exchange expert reading this, you are probably thinking “what about your calendars and contacts?”. You would be totally correct to think this. iRedMail does support SoGo, but not on ARM platforms. This prompted my next component. 

I setup Nextcloud on my web server to add  back the rest of the functionality that I was missing. I can plug it in to the LDAP directory that we use for iRedMail and get single-sign-on. The use of the calendar and contacts apps give me the missing syncing back to my mobile apps. This is done using WebDev. I do now have somewhere to store my data. More on this in a future post.

Conclusion

I think I was a bit silly to running exchange in 2021, but I think iRedMail is a fantastic option to quickly spin up a mail server that is fully protected. It also includes the complex setups like DKIM and block lists. But as mentioned. Once setup is done. That is where the functionality ends unfortunately. Then I’m forever using my favourite LDAP editor.

Dovecot, Email, iRedMail, microsoft exchange, Postfix

Linux, Raspberry Pi, Software, Tech

July 12, 2021