This article describes how you can set up your Linux computer to be a web-based e-mail system for yourself or a group of friends. It will work best, of course, if you are on a dedicated internet connection, like a cable modem or a DSL line at home. This will provide you with a secure method to check your e-mail from remote locations without having to add insecure connection methods that could be used by an attacker. . . .
This article describes how you can set up your Linux computer to be a web-based e-mail system for yourself or a group of friends. It will work best, of course, if you are on a dedicated internet connection, like a cable modem or a DSL line at home. This will provide you with a secure method to check your e-mail from remote locations without having to add insecure connection methods that could be used by an attacker. While your friends and coworkers complain about their free web based e-mail system being inaccessible, yours will be humming along.

The combination of software we are using is Apache with mod_ssl and PHP4, and the webmail package we describe below is Aeromail. We chose this combination because it is under active development (as of this writing), easy to install and quite feature rich. We also describe some additional webmail packages at the end of the article and provide several resources for more information.

We assume you haven't installed a web server or the SSL libraries on your system, which we will cover here. While it may seem like a lot of different components, it's really quite simple. Furthermore, your secure web server can be used for other things you may wish to try.

The link for this article located at Linux Journal is no longer available.