Email

Reqad ships a complete mail stack: exim and dovecot for sending and receiving, Roundcube for webmail, and SpamAssassin for filtering - with SPF, DKIM and SRS.

The email overview

Email in the sidebar opens a single page for the whole mail stack. At a glance it shows how many mailboxes, forwarders and autoresponders exist and how many messages are sitting in the queue - each figure links to the page that manages it.

Below that, one card per component: exim and dovecot with their version, whether the service is running, which ports and protocols they answer on, and how long they have been up; dovecot also reports whether full-text search is available. A third card shows the Roundcube version and which webmail plugins are enabled.

Enable email for an account

Open the account and toggle email on.
Reqad generates DKIM keys and the required DNS records.
Verify SPF, DKIM and reverse DNS from the email settings page.

Mailboxes & forwarders

Create mailboxes per domain, with disk usage tracking.
Add forwarders, including pipe-to-program forwards.
Set up autoresponders with start/end dates.
Filter incoming mail per server, per domain or per mailbox - see Email filters.

Filters

Mail can be sorted, flagged, redirected or blocked as it arrives, with rules at three levels - the whole server, one domain, or a single mailbox. Per-mailbox rules are the same ones users see in webmail. See Email filters.

The mail queue

Mail that could not be delivered on the first attempt waits in exim's queue. The queue manager at the bottom of the Email page lists each message with its age, size, sender, recipients and subject, and marks anything exim has frozen - a message it has stopped retrying, usually because the recipient is rejecting it.

View the full headers and the start of the body.
Deliver forces an immediate retry and streams exim's own delivery log into the window, which is usually where the reason for a failure is written.
Freeze and Thaw stop and resume retries for one message.
Delete removes it. This is permanent - the message is not bounced or archived.

Use Select to act on several messages at once, or search by sender or recipient to find one. Run queue retries everything, and Delete all frozen clears out mail that is never going to be delivered.

A queue with tens of thousands of messages takes a long time to read. Reqad checks the depth first and, past a few thousand, asks you to narrow it down with the search or the frozen filter rather than trying to list it all.

Mail server settings

The Configure button on the exim and dovecot cards opens that server's settings in the browser - no SSH needed. The common options are grouped into a form:

Exim - minimum TLS version, cipher list and listening ports; maximum message size, recipients and connections; hostname, SMTP banner and logging; and queue behaviour, such as how long a frozen message is kept and when it is retried.
Exim blocklists - the DNS blocklists (RBLs) consulted while accepting mail, on their own tab. Blocklists that no longer answer are flagged, because a dead one does not fail quietly: every lookup waits for a DNS timeout, on every message.
Dovecot - TLS settings, per-user connection limits, and authentication debug switches for tracking down a login problem.

An Advanced tab exposes the raw configuration file for anything the form does not cover, with the last five versions kept so you can go back.

Every change - from the form or the raw editor - is checked with the mail server's own syntax test before it is written. If it fails, nothing is saved. If the running server rejects it anyway, the previous file is restored automatically and the service is left running.

Webmail

Roundcube is available at the webmail URL for each server, so users can read mail in the browser.

You can also switch on webmail auto-login in the dovecot settings. Each row on the Email Accounts page then gains a Webmail button that opens that mailbox in Roundcube, already signed in - useful for checking a user's mail without asking for, or resetting, their password. It works through a dovecot master user, so no password is exposed and the link is single-use and expires within seconds.

Deliverability

For best inbox placement, make sure each sending domain has a valid SPF record, a published DKIM key (Reqad creates one per domain), and correct reverse DNS for your server IP.

Email settings only need configuring once DNS is in place. Reqad checks and reports the status of each record for you.

Need a hand? Register for early access or contact us.