as the title states, i finally figured out the configuration for zammad helpdesk. it was so easy, i am not sure how i let it pass by. the first thing that got in my way was the email channel, i thought for sure that was making the configuration be pointless. when i heard of zammad, i thought that it was very neat and wanted to try it out. so i deployed it in proxmox as an lxc container and everything installed just fine. the issue was that i kept getting ‘end of file reached’ whenever i connected my zoho mail service to it. i could not find the fix for the life of me, and i decided to leave it at that.

today was a revelation that i figured it out. i decided to use the same smtp settings as before, but just on port 587 with tls, and… it worked. i followed by the documentation to use port 465 with ssl, but i suppose port 587 with tls works as well. not complaining, but it outgoing mail works. imap configuration was easy as it was just a matter of typing in my credentials and the imap zoho server. so to summarize this step with zoho mail, use this:

smtp setup:
host: smtp.zoho.com or smtppro.zoho.com
user: [email protected]
password: password123
port: 587
ssl verification: yes

imap setup:
type: imap
host: imap.zoho.com or imappro.zoho.com
user: [email protected]
password: password123
ssl/starttls: yes
ssl verification: yes
port: 993
folder: inbox
keep messages on server: no

with this configuration, i was finally able to get zammad up and running. keep in mind that if you want imap access, you will have to purchase the mail lite tier from zoho. which is one dollar per user per month. i kept things simple and cheap, so i have two users for my case, coming to twenty four dollars per year.

the next issue i came across was accessing zammad over an https connection. whenever i accessed zammad from its fqdn (zammad.domain.com), it kept resolving to the nginx success page. so go to settings > system and here you will configure the fqdn that is configured in your dns server. keep in mind that i am using nginx proxy manager to reverse proxy http and https requests to the server ip address and port. once the fqdn is configured and the http type is set to https, you then have to ssh into the server and configure nginx. now this is done in two locations, but the one that sticks the nginx configuration is within the nginx files, not the zammad files. though for continuity, i configure both. these files are located at:

/opt/zammad/contrib/nginx/zammad.conf
and
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/zammad.conf

use any text editor and edit the server block configuration ‘server_name’:

server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;

# replace ‘localhost’ with your fqdn if you want to use zammad from remote
server_name zammad.domain.com;

this is crucial to the whole configuration as it changes where the website is accessed. you can add more names by separating the fqdn with a single space.

i plan to expose this behind cloudflare’s proxy network, but for now it will be tested in my local environment. and then eventually i will move off of uv desk and onto zammad.