How to Prepare the Webmail for Future Skinning

This article describes the modification required in the Axigen configuration to allow the webmail to be run from a different directory.

Solution

The webmail interface root folder contains all the information required to serve the processed pages back to the browser. Changes for any file in the webmail folder will be lost during an update because all files will be re-written.

To prepare the webmail for the skinning process, the base folder must be copied to another location or renamed. To achieve this, go to the directory containing the webmail root and copy the folder:

cp webmail webmail.new

NOTE:
On Windows you just have to create a copy of the folder "C:\Program Files\Axigen Mail Server\webmail" and give it a different name (i.e. webmail.new).

Then, all changes have to be performed in the "webmail.new" folder during the skinning process. During the upgrades the default location of the webmail will be re-written.

To change the Axigen configuration to reflect the new location of the modified webmail, so it will be correctly loaded, the Axigen configuration file must be edited.

NOTE: The path to the axigen.cfg file is /var/opt/axigen/run/axigen.cfg for Linux and Solaris systems, /var/axigen/run/axigen.cfg for BSD systems and "C:\Program Files\Axigen Mail Server\run\axigen.cfg" for Windows.

In the configuration file, change the line:

path = "/var/opt/axigen/webmail" to path = "/var/opt/axigen/webmail.new"

for the webmail service and save the file.

For Windows, change:

path = "webmail" to path = "webmail.new"

NOTE: Make sure you do not have any active webadmin sessions during this process as any saves might over-write the manual changes you just made.

NOTE: The path to the webmail folder is different between systems (BSD and Linux for example) and should be adapted to the required values.

After the modifications are saved in the configuration file, a service reload or restart is required to apply and load them.

From this point on, the webmail will be loaded from the new folder and any modifications made to the files within will be kept during upgrades.

WARNING: If any modifications are made to the webmail files, future revisions of the pages that are normally applied through an update will not be included in the edited version. The webmail interface needs to be edited again after each upgrade or the old one must be used instead. However, using the old webmail interface might not be possible with later versions of the product.
OS: LinuxWindowsFreeBSDNetBSDOpenBSDSolaris
Distros: WindowsDEB based distros amd64