Unable to Install and Initialize Postal Mail Server on Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04

[365stealer]

I have been experiencing persistent issues installing and running the Postal Mail Server on both Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

I carefully followed the installation requirements and prerequisites, including installing Docker and Docker Compose directly from their official documentation to ensure I wasn't using outdated or incorrect packages. Despite this, I have been unable to get Postal running successfully.

After completing the installation, whenever I execute:

postal initialize

or

sudo postal initialize

I receive errors, and the initialization process never completes successfully.

Similarly, when I run:

postal make-user

or

sudo postal make-user

no user is created, and Postal does not appear to connect to the database at all.

While troubleshooting, I replaced every occurrence of localhost in the configuration with 127.0.0.1, thinking it might resolve a networking or DNS issue. Unfortunately, this made no difference.

I am also unable to access the Postal web interface after the installation.

To rule out DNS issues, I fully configured my domain's DNS records, including the required records for mail delivery, bounce handling, and return-path processing. The DNS is active and functioning correctly for email services, yet Postal still does not initialize or become operational.

At this point, I have spent more than two weeks trying to resolve this problem without success. I have reinstalled the server multiple times, repeated the installation from scratch, and followed several installation guides, but I continue to encounter the same issues.

I would greatly appreciate a complete, up-to-date, production-ready installation guide or assistance in identifying what I may be missing. If there are any additional logs, diagnostic commands, or configuration files that would help identify the root cause, I am happy to provide them.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

[willpower232]

are you able to share the error messages you see?

[365stealer]

root@vmi3443400:# postal restart
root@vmi3443400:# postal initialize
[+] pull 1/14
✔ Image ghcr.io/postalserver/postal:3.3.7 Pulled 32.1s
Container postal-runner-run-4d9ed403222f Creating
Container postal-runner-run-4d9ed403222f Created
Initializing database
Loading config from /config/postal.yml
WARNING: Using legacy config file format. Upgrade your postal.yml to use
version 2 of the Postal configuration or configure using environment
variables. See https://docs.postalserver.io/config-v2 for details.
There is an issue connecting to your database with your username/password, username: postal.

Please check your database configuration to ensure the username/password are valid.
Couldn't create 'postal' database. Please check your configuration.
rake aborted!
ActiveRecord::DatabaseConnectionError: There is an issue connecting to your database with your username/password, username: postal. (ActiveRecord::DatabaseConnectionError)

[willpower232]

did you configure both database connections in your config file or environment?

[365stealer]

yes i did everything perfectly

[365stealer]

After completing the installation, my Postal dashboard is still not accessible. I have carefully followed all the installation steps and completed the required configurations, but the dashboard is not loading.

For DNS, I am using Namecheap. I created an A record with the hostname postal that points to my VPS public IP address. I also configured the reverse DNS (rDNS/PTR) on my VPS provider to match my domain name.

Despite these configurations, the Postal web interface is still not working.

Could you please help me identify what I might be missing or what could be causing the issue? If there are any additional checks, logs, or configuration files you need me to provide, I'll be happy to share them.

Access to postal.kids4funplay.space was denied
You don't have the user rights to view this page.
HTTP ERROR 403

[willpower232]

https://github.com/orgs/postalserver/discussions/3608