I'm getting 'WebMail is not configured properly' error. What's wrong? (Linux only)

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This error usually occurs due to the following reasons:

 * The path to WebMail Pro data folder has not been specified. See below how to specify it.
 * The specified data folder location could not be accessed by WebMail Pro application (typically, insufficient permissions for apache.apache user to access data folder). Read More.

WebMail Pro installation consists of two main folders: web and data. The web folder contains the WebMail Pro application itself. The data folder stores settings, temporary files, etc. You will usually place web and data folders into different locations on the server because web folder must be visible to everyone (i.e. you can access it from the web via HTTP or HTTPS) whereas data folder must be not (i.e. only WebMail Pro scripts should have access to this folder as it contains private data of your mail users).

To let WebMail Pro application know where you placed data folder, you should specify the path to data folder in $dataPath value of inc_settings_path.php file. This file resides in web folder of WebMail Pro installation.

Please note that $dataPath refers to the physical path (e.g. /var/SomeFolder), NOT virtual path (e.g. http://www.server.com/somefolder). In other words, $dataPath denotes the path where the data folder physically resides on the file system of the server. Moreover, to prevent unauthorized access from the web, it’s recommended to have data folder in the place which does not correspond to any virtual folder at all and cannot be accessed with http:// or https:// syntax.

<?php
    $dataPath = '/var/webmail-data';
?>


If you're on shared hosting server, you often do not know absolute physical path to the root folder of your hosting space on the file system of the server. However, you can still use relative physical path, see Example 2. Relative path must specify the location of WebMail Pro data folder relatively to WebMail Pro web folder so that scripts from web folder could find data folder using this path.

Also, it's actually possible to have WebMail Pro web and data folders in the same folder. For instance, you may need to keep WebMail Pro web and data folders together if your shared hosting provides only web folder and all the space is visible from the web.

For instance, let's assume "/" folder is the root of your shared hosting account (corresponds to http://your-shared-hosting.com/ virtual path), and you copied the contents of web folder of WebMail Pro package into /webmail and data folder into /webmail-data. See Example 3 on how to specify $dataPath.

Although you can use such configuration, you should prevent unauthorized access to webmail-data folder from the web. Disable web access to the /webmail-data folder in the settings of that folder in IIS manager.

Example 1. You use dedicated server hosting or installed WebMail Pro on your computer.

Let's assume you’ve already created a virtual folder called webmail and mapped it to the physical folder /var/www/html/webmail-pro on the file system of your server. Then, you copied all the contents of web folder of WebMail Pro installation package into /var/www/html/webmail-pro folder.

Also, let's assume you want to have data folder (where WebMail Pro will store settings and user data) in /var/www/webmail-pro-data location. You created a folder /var/www/webmail-pro-data and copied there all the contents of data folder of WebMail Pro installation package.

Now, open /var/www/html/webmail-pro/inc_settings_path.php file, find $dataPath parameter and change its value to /var/www/webmail-pro-data.

<?php
    $dataPath = '/var/www/webmail-pro-data';
?>


Example 2. You are on shared hosting and want to keep data folder separately for better security.

On shared hosting, you typically do not know the absolute physical path to your hosting space on the file system (HDD) of the server. In this case, you should use relative path for data folder. For instance, let's assume:

 * The root folder of your hosting account is called ftp and it contains the web folder which is visible from the web as http://shared-hosting.com/. However, ftp folder itself is NOT visible from the web, only its sub-folder web is.
 * In web folder of your hosting account, you created webmail sub-folder and placed the contents of web folder of WebMail Pro package there (so that the URL to the WebMail Pro will be http://your-shared-hosting.com/webmail).

Let's put data folder in ftp folder (which is not visible from the web). To distinguish our data folder from any folders of other applications, let's call it webmail-data. Now, we should specify the relative path to travel from ftp/web/webmail folder into ftp/webmail-data folder. Since ftp folder is two-levels up to ftp/web/webmail folder, we need to:

 * go up two levels (../..) to return to ftp level
 * then go down /webmail-data level.

Thus, the relative path will be ../../webmail-data. When a script which resides in ftp/web/webmail folder, accesses a file under the path ../../webmail-data/somefile, it finds that file in ftp/webmail-data/ folder.

<?php
    $dataPath = '../../webmail-data';
?>


Example 3. You are on shared hosting and want to keep web and data folder in the same place.

Let's assume you have data and web folders in the same folder and have already secured data folder using your web server settings. For instance, /webmail is web folder and /webmail-data is data folder. The relative path from /webmail to /webmail-data will be ../webmail-data.

<?php
    $dataPath = '../webmail-data';
?>
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