MailCleaner Source Installation

These instructions are intended to allow for the installation of MailCleaner on top of a generic Debian installation. This option is available for community testing of pre-release versions of MailCleaner-Next. For production use, we recommend waiting until pre-built images are available.

System Requirements

MailCleaner has absolute minimum requirements of:

• 2 CPU
• 4 GB RAM
• 60 GB SATA III, 7200 rpm hard drive
• 100 Mbps network card
• 2 Mbps network connectivity

However, this will not support mail volume for more than about 100 users.

For larger production environments we recommend:

• For 100-500 users: 4 CPU 4GB RAM 100GB Disk

• For 500-1000 users: 8 CPU 8GB RAM 200GB Disk

• For more than 1000 users we recommend: create a cluster with one node per 1000 users that are proportioned to the 500-1000 specifications.

Install Debian

To use this installation method, you will first need an existing Debian Bookworm installation. If you use a cloud hosting solution, it probably already has a Debian Bookworm (12) image available. Otherwise, you can find various images here:

https://www.debian.org/distrib/

We recommend at least 8GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores.

Install packages

apt-get update; apt-get install git gpg -y

All other dependencies will be installed in the next step.

Install MailCleaner-Next

Clone this repository to /usr/mailcleaner/:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MailCleaner/MailCleaner-Next.git /usr/mailcleaner

Run installation script:

cd /usr/mailcleaner/
debian-bootstrap/install.sh

Configure

The previous command will automatically run the first-time configuration wizard as well, which will, in turn, launch the actual mailcleaner installation script and all of it's child scripts. Go through all of the menu options (unless marked as optional).

(optional) Clone Existing Installation

WARNING: This is not yet tested. At the very least, this version is not ready to be treated as a proper migration for production use. You may wish to test the cloning to see how everything works with your old settings, but do not decommission your existing host.

If you already have a MailCleaner installation, you can clone each host one-to-one using the upgrading guide.

Running in VMWare?

You can get improved integration using the openvm-tools package:

apt-get update
apt-get install open-vm-tools

Bugs

Be aware that this version of MailCleaner, and the installation script are still in development and we can provide no guarantees on stability or complete functionality. You should expect bugs. We appreciate anyone who opts to help us test the new release and welcome all bug reports as Issues in our GitHub repository.

Please check to see if there is an existing issue related to your problem and feel free to comment on that thread before opening a duplicate.

If you have the knowledge to be able to fix any issues you discover, we welcome Pull Requests.