mailarchiva: dockerized - ✉️ + 🐋 = 💕

Run Mailarchiva, the email archiving, e-discovery, compliance and forensics platform that helps to retain, organize and mine email data in Docker!

Motivation

The existing projects, which try to run Mailarchiva as a Docker container, are outdated and not working anymore. I also disliked that they all tried to mimic the traditional on premise installation which is not necessary for a Tomcat application.

That's why I created this project.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• A Unix-like operating system: macOS, Linux, BSD.
• git should be installed (recommended v2.36.1 or higher)
• Docker >= 27.4.0

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/tgoetten/mailarchiva-docker.git

2. Download latest Mailarchiva WAR file from https://stimulussoft.com/downloads and save it in files/

   wget https://stimulussoft.b-cdn.net/mailarchiva_v8.12.16.war -P files # for (old) Mailarchiva v8
   wget https://stimulussoft.b-cdn.net/mailarchiva-9.0.36.war -P files/

3. Create a copy of the .env file and adjust it to your needs.

   cp env.sample .env

4. (optional) Adapt ``docker-compose.yaml if needed

5. Start

   docker-compose up

Update

Before you perform the update steps above it is highly recommended to first create a backup.

1. Download latest Mailarchiva WAR file from https://stimulussoft.com/downloads and save it in files/

   wget wget https://stimulussoft.b-cdn.net/mailarchiva-9.0.36.war -P files

2. Update Dockerfile to use the new .war file when (re-) building the image. To do this, just update the ENV variable with the new .war filename

   ENV MAILARCHIVA_WAR=mailarchiva-9.0.36.war \
   ...
   

3. Build image

   DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t mailarchiva .
   

4. Stop and Re-Start the Container

   docker-compose stop && docker-compose up -d
   

Login to Mailarchiva and make sure the version has changed.

Upgrade from version 8 to version 9

Upgrading from version 8 to version 9 is done by either updating or replacing the Dockerfile and then build a new image same as done through the update step.

Disk usage

Mailarchiva will frequently write temporary files that in a NAS environment can prevent the disks from spinning down even if there is no activity on the mail servers.

In particular, JDK jstat will write to /tmp/hsperfdata_root/1 and Mailalchiva will use /etc/ROOT/performance.stat to display /status.do?page=chart.

To prevent this, in docker-compose.yaml, mount two tmpfs volumes.

services:
  mailarchiva:
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp/mailarchiva
      - /tmp/hsperfdata_root

A singular file can not be mounted to tmpfs. Luckily, Mailarchiva will follow a symlink, but we need to create it in the local etc storage.

cd etc/ROOT
ln -s performance.stat /tmp/mailarchiva/performance.stat

Todos

• Automate Download of Mailarchiva WAR file
• Move from debian image to something smaller (less bloat, quicker build)
• Add instructions to update Mailarchiva to a newer version
• Add support for SSL Certificate using Traefik

Reference

• https://github.com/bytecast-de/docker-mailarchiva
• https://github.com/that0n3guy/docker
• https://github.com/egargale/mailarchiva_alpine