Introducing ViMbAdmin – Virtual Mailbox Administration

About two weeks ago, my company released an internal software project, ViMbAdmin, as open source under a GPL3 license. So far the reception has been great for a project we just put out there. We have over ten third party installs and are getting good feedback and activity on the Google Code platform where we host it.

ViMbAdmin (pronounced vim-be-admin) is essentially a modern replacement for PostfixAdmin – a web based interface which will allow you to manage virtual mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases.

We have a live demo which you can access here. You can also browse screenshots by clicking the image on this page.

ViMbAdmin was written in PHP using our own web application framework which includes the Zend Framework, the Doctrine ORM and the Smarty templating system with JQuery on the frontend.

The decision to use Smarty, Doctrine and Zend unfortunately adds a bit of overhead for someone installing the product as they will also need to locate these third party libraries. Fortunately:

  • many distributions include all three as packages now;
  • if you take the svn install option then they will be also installed from external svn sources.

ViMbAdmin can work as a slot in replacement for Postfix Admin with a few MySQL ALTER statements.

Features

  • Super admin(s) user level with full access;
  • Admin(s) user level with access only to assigned domains and their mailboxes and aliases;
  • Super admins can create and modify super admins and admins;
  • JQuery Datatable throughout for quick in browser searching and pagination;
  • Create, modify and purge domains including limited the number of mailboxes and aliases a non-super admin can create per-domain;
  • Activate / deactivate admins, domains, mailboxes and aliases at the click of a button;
  • Full logging;
  • Facility for users (mailbox owners) to change their password;
  • Forgotten Password / Password Reset function for admins;
  • Very configurable including:
    • set default values for quotas, number of mailboxes and aliases for domain creation;
    • templated welcome and settings email for users;
    • either plain or MD5 mailbox password support.

We hope it’s of use to you!