Administration
The following covers the common features that administrations wish to setup.
Managers Page

A manager's page is provided as part of the CGI in order to let the system administrator change settings in the user.dat files. On this page it is possible to change any setting for a wildcard selection of users, and to perform other managerial tasks. See below for an example of how to change the disk_quota of all your users.

To access the manager's page, enter the following url:

http://my.site.com/cgi-bin/webimap.cgi?cmd=manager

In order to access the manager's page you will be required to add a line like the following to your webmail.ini file:

managers_password XXXX

Were 'XXXX' is your chosen managers password.

WebMail's management page underwent a major reconstruction in v3.0x. An example of the manager's page (after entering the password) is shown below:


As you can see the manager page is broken up into 4 main sections:

Template Customization

In version v3.0x their are some quick and simple customizable settings, like LOGO, background colors etc.

WebMail Registraction

You can now register WebMail on the managers page allowing much easier and quicker method.

Manager Funcitons

These functions allow you to change, modify and delete use information within WebMail. These functions should be used with care.

WebMail Stats Files

WebMail now has more stat information that you can collect. This tells you how to setup and dispaly the information.

WebMail Bulletins

WebMail supports bulletins where only WebMail users will see them, so you can tell WebMail users about the latest changes and updates to WebMail, or any other information that you want WebMail users to have.

There are a few ini settings which are used for bulletins. These are:

bulletin_path /var/spool/webmail/bulletins
bulletin_users lynden,ralph,adim*
bulletin_dflt_time 30
bulletin_max_time 30

The 'bulletin_path' must be setup and the directories exist in order for bulletins to work. This is where all the bulletin Emails are stored. The 'bulletin_users' are the list of users that are allowed to send bulletins. The last two settings are used to determine how long the bulletin will last before it is removed automatically.

The 'send_bull.tpl' template is used to send a bulletin message. The template 'bulletin.tpl' is the template that lists the current bulletins available. When sending a bulletin, you can specify the list of users that will receive this bulletin if you wish. The default is that all users receive the bulletin.

When there are bulletins that users have not seen before, they are automatically shown the bulletin list when they login instead of the Email list. In this way they are forced to see at least the subject of the bulletin. When using the frames template, the 'frame.tpl' has the code that redirects the page.

ie. ||ifdef||display_bulletin||
        <frame src="||action||?cmd=bulletin&utoken=||utoken||" name="list">
    ||else||
        <frame src="||action||?cmd=list&utoken=||utoken||" name="list">
    ||endif||

When using non-frames the template change is done internally by the CGI.

Global Address Book

WebMail supports the use of user global address books. This allows users (or admin) to setup address books that other users can to access. Below are the steps to creating a global address book.

  1. Select (or create) a user to administer the address book (eg. addresses@your.domain
  2. Create an address book ensuring that it starts with the name:
                            pub_
    ie.    pub_book
  3. Add user's details to this address book.

The above will set up an address book that other users can access if they set their global address book setting on their address book page.

If they enter the name of the user(s) that has the global address book setup inside their 'Public address book' setting, they will then have access to view their address books. A user can enter more than 1 user by separating the names with commas.

ie.    addresses,john,ralph

Only the user which setup the address book can add/change fields inside the address book.

If, as an administrator, you wish to make all current users have a global address book that you have just setup, use the managers page (http://your.domain.com/cgi-bin/webmail.cgi?cmd=manager) to set the user variable 'gaddr_books' to the user that you have setup with the address book.

ie.    addresses,john,ralph

If you also want all new users to WebMail to have this setup, you will need to add the following setting to the default.dat file in the templates directory (in each template directory). If this file is not already there, you should create it. Add a line like the following:

gaddr_books addresses,john,ralph

External Address Book

WebMail version 2.0g and higher supports the use of external global address books. This allows the CGI to talk to the external program, which in turn talks to the external address book.

The external address book is a globally accessible address book which you can ask for queries. Only the administrator can change and/or update the data. This is normally done with some other external program. Users can only read the information.

The main example is setting up your external address book in an LDAP server storing the users information.

The interface and details of the external address book protocol used can be found at: External Address Book.