The order matters more than the commands. The package installs the server enabled and stopped, on purpose: it has no database yet, and nothing in a package can know which backend you have or its credentials. The full sequence, with the output each step prints, is §35.3. Take the exact file names from the downloads page, and note the RPM carries a -1 release field in its name. 1. Install the package. sudo apt install ./<file>.deb on Debian and Ubuntu, sudo dnf install ./<file>.rpm on Fedora and RHEL, sudo zypper install ./<file>.rpm on openSUSE. The RPM is the same file. The maintainer script creates the hmailserver system user and group, creates the directories, and enables the unit without starting it. It deliberately does not walk or chown an existing store. 2. If your backend is MySQL or MariaDB, install the client library now. The server opens it at run time and no package manager will pull it in: libmariadb3 on Debian and Ubuntu, mariadb-connector-c on Fedora and RHEL, mariadb-libs on Arch. PostgreSQL needs nothing extra. 3. Create the database role. Either let the role create its own database, or create an empty one yourself and leave the role without CREATEDB. §35.4 has both, and the SSL keys for a database on another host. 4. Edit /etc/hmailserver/hMailServer.ini. Fill in [Database]. Two rules catch people. Only ; starts a comment, and only at the start of a line. Text after a value on the same line is part of the value, so Type=PostgreSQL ; the backend matches no backend name. Write the port out: PostgreSQL wants 5432, MySQL and MariaDB want 3306. Leave AdministratorPassword alone. 5. Set the administrator password. sudo hmailserver --set-admin-password reads it from standard input with echo off and writes the hash into the file. This is the one step that runs as root, because the file is 0640 root:hmailserver. 6. Create the schema. sudo -u hmailserver hmailserver --create-database. 7. Check it before starting anything. sudo -u hmailserver hmailserver --check-config, as the service user and without --config, so the server has to find the configuration on its own. Database type: 0 means the Type key did not take. It is a report and not a validator: it returns 0 unconditionally, so read the output rather than its exit status. 8. Start it. sudo systemctl start hmailserver, then journalctl -u hmailserver -f. A freshly created database already holds four listeners: SMTP on 25 and 587, POP3 on 110 and IMAP on 143, bound to every address with connection security set to none. Those are database rows, not INI keys, so you change them over the API or the Control Deck's Ports view before this faces the internet. 9. Turn on administration. Set RestApiPort, leave RestApiBindAddress on loopback, and reload. TLS is required unless the bind address is exactly 127.0.0.1, localhost or ::1, so tunnel over SSH rather than exposing it. §35.9 and §35.10 are the rest. Post what --check-config printed and the last lines of journalctl -u hmailserver if a step stops. §35.16 lists the Linux-specific failures by symptom.

The .NET modernisation of the tooling is finished. Every C# component now targets .NET 8. There are no server-core changes and no database change: the schema stays at 6005. What the upgrade involved The supported-OS floor moved to Windows 10 1607, the .NET 8 runtime's own minimum, and the obsolete .NET Framework 4.5 gate is gone. The .NET 8 Desktop Runtime became a server-component prerequisite, not just a Control Panel one, and its exit code is checked before the database tools run at post-install. Changes DBSetup, DBSetupQuick, DBUpdater, DataDirectorySynchronizer and the Shared library moved from .NET Framework 4.8.1 to SDK-style net8.0-windows. The COM API is consumed through a checked-in tlbimp wrapper in source/Tools/Interop/, so the tools build with plain dotnet build and no registered typelib. The silent command-line contract the installer depends on is unchanged. The five VB6 migration wizards are gone. None could be built, their shared VB6 sources were never in the repository, and three migrated from products dead for two decades. The two worth keeping return as one .NET 8 Import Tool under Addons. Accounts from a comma-separated text file get per-line validation and a created/updated/failed summary instead of a crash on the first malformed line. Messages from mbox files stream through the supported COM API, Utilities.ImportMessageFromFileToIMAPFolder, one IMAP folder per file, rather than raw MySQL INSERTs. The silently dropped last message, CRLF mailboxes parsing as one giant message, mboxrd >From quoting and SMTP dot-stuffing corrupting stored messages are all fixed. CI now builds every C# project, with warnings-as-errors on the tools solution. Previously only the Control Panel was built, which let the NUnit 4 bump break the test and tool projects invisibly. The test suite runs on NUnit 4.6.1, with the 2,200+ classic assert call sites kept compiling through NUnit 4.6's C# 14 extension members. Local-address selection now probes for an address the server answers on instead of trusting interface enumeration order, which broke under a connected VPN. The full regression suite passed 1026 of 1026 against the rebuilt service, with live SpamAssassin and ClamAV. Full release notes, checksums and signatures

hMailServer 6.2.10 fixed an authorization defect in the COM API. Fifteen methods rejected an unauthorized caller with return false. These functions return HRESULT, where false is 0, which is S_OK, so each one reported success for a call it had just refused. Anyone administering the server through a COM client or script was affected. What the upgrade involved Drop-in over 6.2.9. No database change, schema version 6005, and no configuration change. Two administration front-ends were removed, so a custom install that ticked "Administrative tools" for the WebAdmin or hMailAdmin.exe had nothing left to run. The component is now "Remote administration support (registers the COM API for scripts)", which is what it always did. COM scripts against a remote instance still work. The changes: InterfaceCache's five getters returned before writing *pVal, so a caller without server-admin rights got S_OK and read uninitialized memory. InterfaceSettings::SetAdministratorPassword and five siblings skipped the write and reported success, so the caller was told the administrator password had changed when it had not. InterfaceMessageIndexing's four methods did the same. (0d01a55) Found by running CodeQL's C++ suite locally. The workflow analysed C# only, so 4.65 MB of network-facing code had never been scanned. It returned 16 high-severity findings, 15 of them these. A re-run after the fix returns 1, a verified false positive in FileUtilities.cpp. The PHP WebAdmin is gone (53f52eb). It stored the administrator password in plaintext in a PHP session and replayed it to Authenticate() on every request. The installer dropped from 400 payload files to 255. Code-quality findings in shipped, hand-written code: 958 to 0. DBUpdater rethrew with throw ex, resetting the stack trace on the database-upgrade failure path. Three as casts dereferenced without a null check. PngByteQRCode was built per render in the two-factor dialog and never disposed. OpenTelemetryTracing bound its OTLP collector to port 9099, the port the server's own metrics listener uses. With NUnit running 32 workers in parallel it could not bind. It now uses 9096. Full release notes, checksums and signatures

hMailServer 6.2.6 added IMAP4rev2 (RFC 9051) as an opt-in session mode. The server advertises IMAP4rev2, and a client that issues ENABLE IMAP4rev2 gets RFC 9051 semantics for that connection. IMAP4rev1 behaviour is unchanged until a client opts in. The rest of the release is Control Panel and installer work. IMAP4rev2 In the opt-in mode: ESEARCH by default, \Recent and RECENT dropped from SELECT, EXAMINE and STATUS, the obsolete [UNSEEN] response code suppressed, and UTF-8 acceptance. Control Panel A central theme-aware colour-token system replaced scattered hardcoded colours. Success, warning, danger and info, and the log palette, now adapt to light, dark and high-contrast themes. A Fluent nav selection style and a brand keyboard-focus ring. Live-log colours legible on the light theme, readable data grids with balanced columns, and settings forms capped to a readable column with right-sized inputs. KPI colours that encode state, softened destructive buttons, "no activity" chart placeholders, and a Welcome page of clickable quick-action tiles. Every configurable server setting now has a GUI control: OAuth2 and external-token auth, SRS and BATV, submission and outbound rate limits, OpenTelemetry and the slow-query log, connection timeouts, delivery and queue tuning, search indexing, message archiving and other INI knobs, Logging.Device and LogFormat, cache size caps, the domain Active Directory link, and a write-only secret editor. Documented in settings.md. Two-factor authentication setup renders a real scannable QR code, with a grouped manual key and a copy button, and a larger verification field. Installer A DPI-scaled custom database-type page, modernised copy and refreshed brand imagery. The dead legacy dependency installers were removed: MSI, IE6, MDAC, JET and .NET 2.0. The server core was validated by the full regression suite, 898 of 898 tests passing, including live SpamAssassin, ClamAV against EICAR, DMARC against live DNS, and TLS 1.2 and 1.3 handshakes end to end. Full release notes, checksums and signatures

This was a beta build of the 6.0 line. 6.0.0 was the production release. Nothing here should be installed today. Build 3 shipped VC++ runtime DLLs that did not match the toolset the binaries were built with, and the service crashed at startup on fresh installs. This build corrects the installer payload. The detail: hMailServer.exe is built with v145 (14.51), but build 3 bundled VS2019-era (14.25) VC++ runtime DLLs app-local in Bin\. Those app-local copies were loaded instead of the system runtimes, and the service died at startup with 0xC0000005 in msvcp140!mtx_do_lock, reached via boost regex and std::mutex. Fresh installs were the ones affected. Changes in this build: The installer now ships Microsoft.VC145.CRT (14.51.36231), matching the build toolset. The stale Microsoft.VC142.CRT payload has been removed. The bundled 2015-era UCRT has been removed. It has been in-box since Server 2016 and Windows 10. build/run-tests.ps1: fixed a stdout/stderr pipe deadlock in the test runner. The full regression gate ran against MariaDB on the MYSQL backend: 898 of 898 passed. Full release notes, checksums and signatures

6.0.0 is the first modernised release of the fork: 64-bit only, built with the VS2026 toolchain, with OpenSSL 4 and TLS 1.2 and 1.3 underneath. Build 4 is the production build, and it fixes the installer defect that made build 3 unusable on fresh installations. What the upgrade involved 6.0 was 64-bit only. The installer dropped the obsolete 2015-era UCRT, which had been included in Windows since Server 2016 / Windows 10. Upgrade notes and the full feature list are in the README. The installer fix Build 3 bundled VS2019-era VC++ runtime DLLs. The service loaded those instead of the current ones and crashed at startup with an access violation in msvcp140.dll on fresh installations. Build 4 ships the matching v145 (14.51) runtimes. Build 3 also fixed MySQL/MariaDB database creation, which was a script line-ending problem, and bundles libmysql.dll. What 6.0 brought OpenSSL 4, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 MTA-STS and DANE, with in-process DNSSEC validation ARC sealing and Ed25519 DKIM ACME (Let's Encrypt) built in REST admin API and Prometheus metrics IMAP MOVE, ID and SPECIAL-USE PBKDF2 password hashing The release was validated by the full regression suite: 898 of 898 tests passing, zero failures, run against a MariaDB (MySQL backend) instance, including live SpamAssassin, ClamAV with real EICAR detection, DMARC against live DNS, and TLS 1.2 and 1.3 end to end. Full release notes, checksums and signatures