Hi all. I have recently discovered YuNoHost and I really like it. My first installation did not go so well, (mainly around email addresses) but I could see the tremendous potential. So I am looking for some guidance.
I will be installing the latest version of YuNoHost for Debian 12 on a VPS. The purpose of the YuNoHost instance is to share with family and friends in a more private environment. The domain I have is mydomain.tld and it already has external email with webmail that is not as full featured as I would like. I would prefer to use a YuNoHost supplied webmail/groupware app to access the external IMAP server on mydomain.tld. I do not want any of the YuNoHost email services to be on mydomain.tld. A subdomain would be fine. However, I do want all of the other apps to be on a subfolder (eg. mydomain.tld/photos) or subdomain (eg. photos.mydomain.tld). I want the users to be able to use their existing, non-YuNoHost, email addresss.
So any guidance, discussions or suggestions on how to achieve these goals through installation or configuration changes would be appreciated.
Your mail server is another provider, but you want to use Yunohost to act on this provider like a webmail ?
Like gmail can do with other domain mail adress ?
Dunno if it’s possible. But there is something that is possible : you can have both
You can use the provider to send and receive the e-mails and let your Yunohost server send emails with the same domain name.
Apps
For all your apps, when installing an app, there is a section about the domain.tld to configure with the app :
Either the application you’re about to install can work on a subfolder, and so you just have to choose the right name for your app
either the application you’re about to install need a subdomain (or a full domain), so at this moment you’ve got to click on “add a domain”, and in the windows that pops, there is an option to add a subdomain for your domain.tld
Users
a user in Yunohost HAS a local email adress. The whole system is based upon user account and user email.
But you can update the user, and add a follow up email address, in order to let your users get their emails from your app on your Yunohost server, with your domain.tld domain name, in their “personnal” email addresses.
Yes, exactly, I want to be able to use a YunoHost webclient like gmail, where I can specify the mail servers for a different domain.
I did try this with SOGo, and I can add the external email’s servers, but ran into a “No Mailbox selected” message which seems like a common, persistent issue with that webmail client. There is no place in the GUI for RoundMail to configure different email servers. However, I did try SnappyMail and it does allow setting up external email servers. What I eventually tried was at setup time to set YunoHost’s domain to ynh.mydomain.tld. This creates all of the default users and subsequent users to have email addresses on ynh.mydomain.tld. Then in YunoHost, I added a new domain for mydomain.tld.
This allows me to install apps on mydomain.tld, while having the default email be sent from ynh.mydomain.tld.
You can use the provider to send and receive the e-mails and let your Yunohost server send emails with the same domain name.
I am quite uncomfortable with that. My understanding is that when email is set up, you add SPF, DCIM, and DMARC records to your DNS which allows email receivers to trust email that is being sent from a single SMTP server. I do not want to risk my domain’s email or my YunoHost server’s email being blacklisted because email is being received from 2 different SMTP servers. Now, my understanding of this may be totally wrong, so please feel free to correct me. I also do not like that, by using the same domain, it would be possible to set up the same email address on YunoHost as on my external server. eg postmaster@mydomain.tld. It seems that could cause some real headaches with debugging the problems associated with a shared email address.
Thank you for the clue about users being able to have a “Mail forward” be set up for them so that they receive all email from YunoHost on their preferred email address. That is an great workaround.
