Practical Ansible Mail

Installs Postfix and Dovecot and configures them to act together as IMAP/SMTP mail server with virtual database of mailboxes and domains provided by OpenLDAP. Uses Lets Encrypt to generate certificates for communication.

You need to define {{base_domain}} to keep your passwords stored in password storage. Hostname of your mail server will be configured as mail.{{base_domain}} unless you override variable {{mail_host}}.

Manual configuration

Ansible role is not able to configure DNS for you. You will need to configure few DNS records.

DNS Before playing role

• an A and/or AAAA with {{mail_host}} pointing to the IP address of mail server, it is required to configure Letsencrypt certificates

After playing role

• TXT record with your DKIM key, you need this to sign your e-mails
• TXT record with your DKIM version, you need this to sign your e-mails
• PTR record, some mail servers will not talk to you if you skip this

For each organization, you will need to configure a TXT record with Open DKIM key. You will find the DKIM keys in folder remote/{{organization}}. The file might look like this:

mail._domainkey IN      TXT     ( "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; "
          "p=VERY_LONG_SECRET_KEY" )  ; ----- DKIM key mail for example.com

Your TXT records would look like this:

TXT "mail._domainkey.example.com" "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=VERY_LONG_SECRET_KEY"
TXT "example.com" "v=spf1 mx a -all"

Client configuration

To configure your e-mail client use following settings:

IMAP
----
host: {{mail_host}}:143
user: user@{{organization}}
encryption: STARTTLS

SMTP
----
host: {{mail_host}}:587
user: user@{{organization}}
encryption: STARTTLS