Hi, I’m a History teacher setting up a mail server for a website for my WWII class; I don’t get much traffic any more, so self-hosting seems the best way to go. It’s been decades since I set up a mail server, and it seems more complicated these days. I installed Mailcow, but when I run “docker compose up -d” everything is working EXCEPT unbound.

I looked and looked on GitHub and this Community, and created the basic DNS records, and copied the SSL certificate over to the installation. I read about the DNS records to create for Mailcow and did that. Everything is green except Unbound. I tried the Cloudpanel/Cloudflare changes suggested here, and different tweaks suggested online. Some things get a little technical for me tho. I’m not sure where to find the Mailcow logs so I dunno what is failing.

Sorry I’m such a newbie. I’m just trying to get this set up before my school year starts…

Thanks so much.

  • Hi, I found a commercial provider that can host my custom domain email for free, so I don’t need to set up mailcow. I was never able to resolve the unbound issue. Anyway, I’m all set. Thanks everybody!

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Running and configuring a mailserver is a complex thing, especially nowadays with all that antispam measures, and mailcow is not just a mailserver, it is a groupware offering more than just a mailserver.
Please tell us the use case for your “mailserver”. Is it just to be able to send mails from the website?

Hi, thanks everyone. yes, I am just setting up the ability for people to email me from the website with questions or corrections. I am not really using Mailcow as groupware as the students have school email and I am the only user on the self-hosted web server. So only one email address.

The logs show this:

unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:06:34: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 1.1.1.1 on attempt 1. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:06:46: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 1.1.1.1 on attempt 2. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:06:58: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 1.1.1.1 on attempt 3. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:06:58: Healthcheck: Couldn’t ping 1.1.1.1 after 3 attempts. Marking this IP as failed.
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:07:10: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 8.8.8.8 on attempt 1. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:07:22: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 8.8.8.8 on attempt 2. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:07:34: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 8.8.8.8 on attempt 3. Trying again…
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:07:34: Healthcheck: Couldn’t ping 8.8.8.8 after 3 attempts. Marking this IP as failed.
unbound-mailcow-1 | 2024-09-09 22:07:46: Healthcheck: Failed to ping 9.9.9.9 on attempt 1. Trying again…

I am unsure how to resolve this. I assume this is a problem with Cloudflare DNS?

Thanks everybody for your time and help.

    Scotisle

    It seems your firewall might be blocking the Unbound requests.

    Please check your firewall rules and this might fix the Unbound issue.

        Scotisle ability for people to email me from the website with questions

        Mailcow is then a total overkill. Just a simple postfix container will do the job.
        Or even a free mail address from outlook.com or so which you then configure in your website’s SMTP integration.

          Thanks! My understanding is that Outlook won’t allow custom domain names.

          I chose Mailcow because I setup the server with Cloudpanel, and they recommended it over other mail options. It was relatively straightforward to use and install except for unbound failing. I’m not sure how to allow 1.1.1.1 to pass through the Cloudpanel firewall but those links posted give some ideas.

            Scotisle

            Ah, since you mention cloudpanel…

            Cloudpanel installs ufw rules (which is the default firewall shipped with Ubuntu), and it only opens ports you can see in the admin UI.

            You will need to open ICMP to allow the ping checks to work. You can check your firewall rules status with ‘ufw status’.

            Hosting a webserver and mailcow on the same server is not the best practice and it would make sense if you could spin up another VM to run your mailcow setup in without the Cloudpanel firewall/nginx/postfix etc impacting your mailcow instance.

            Like @esackbauer mentioned, setting up a mail server is a lot of work let alone maintaining and managing it to run without issues.

            If it’s an incoming email with a custom domain required, then you could simply use cloudflare’s email routing feature, along with using their DNS services for your domain, to create customized email addresses for receiving emails.
            You will still need an email provider where these emails will be routed to, and you cannot send emails with this custom email address.
            Cloudflare Docs Icon Get started | Cloudflare Email Routing docs

            Cloudflare Docs Icon Cloudflare Docs
            Get started | Cloudflare Email Routing docs
            To enable Email Routing, start by creating a custom email address linked to a destination address or Email Worker. This forms an email rule. You can enable or disable rules from the Cloudflare dashboard. Refer to Enable Email Routing for more details.

            Alternatively, if its an academic exercise to learn to setup a mailserver, you can still go ahead with mailcow, but please try to set it up on a different server if possible, if not it will be a lot of mangling with the firewall rules.

              Hi, I found a commercial provider that can host my custom domain email for free, so I don’t need to set up mailcow. I was never able to resolve the unbound issue. Anyway, I’m all set. Thanks everybody!

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