Before you run **mailcow: dockerized**, there are a few requirements that you should check:
!!! warning
Do **not** try to install mailcow on a Synology/QNAP device (any NAS), OpenVZ, LXC or other container platforms. KVM, ESX, Hyper-V and other full virtualization platforms are supported.
!!! info
- mailcow: dockerized requires [some ports](#default-ports) to be open for incoming connections, so make sure that your firewall is not blocking these.
- Make sure that no other application is interfering with mailcow's configuration, such as another mail service
- A correct DNS setup is crucial to every good mailserver setup, so please make sure you got at least the [basics](../prerequisite/prerequisite-dns.en.md#the-minimal-dns-configuration) covered before you begin!
- Make sure that your system has a correct date and [time setup](#date-and-time). This is crucial for various components like two factor TOTP authentication.
## Minimum System Resources
**OpenVZ, Virtuozzo and LXC are not supported**.
Please make sure that your system has at least the following resources:
We recommend using any distribution listed as supported by Docker CE (check https://docs.docker.com/install/). We test on CentOS 7, Debian 10/11 and Ubuntu 18.04/20.04.
ClamAV and Solr can be greedy with RAM. You may disable them in `mailcow.conf` by settings `SKIP_CLAMD=y` and `SKIP_SOLR=y`.
**Info**: We are aware that a pure MTA can run on 128 MiB RAM. mailcow is a full-grown and ready-to-use groupware with many extras making life easier. mailcow comes with a webserver, webmailer, ActiveSync (MS), antivirus, antispam, indexing (Solr), document scanner (Oletools), SQL (MariaDB), Cache (Redis), MDA, MTA, various web services etc.
A single SOGo worker **can** acquire ~350 MiB RAM before it gets purged. The more ActiveSync connections you plan to use, the more RAM you will need. A default configuration spawns 20 workers.
#### Usage examples
A company with 15 phones (EAS enabled) and about 50 concurrent IMAP connections should plan 16 GiB RAM.
6 GiB RAM + 1 GiB swap are fine for most private installations while 8 GiB RAM are recommended for ~5 to 10 users.
We can help to correctly plan your setup as part of our support.
## Firewall & Ports
Please check if any of mailcow's standard ports are open and not in use by other applications:
There are several problems with running mailcow on a firewalld/ufw enabled system. You should disable it (if possible) and move your ruleset to the DOCKER-USER chain, which is not cleared by a Docker service restart, instead. See [this (blog.donnex.net)](https://blog.donnex.net/docker-and-iptables-filtering/) or [this (unrouted.io)](https://unrouted.io/2017/08/15/docker-firewall/) guide for information about how to use iptables-persistent with the DOCKER-USER chain.
As mailcow runs dockerized, INPUT rules have no effect on restricting access to mailcow. Use the FORWARD chain instead.
If this command returns any results please remove or stop the application running on that port. You may also adjust mailcows ports via the `mailcow.conf` configuration file.
### Default Ports
If you have a firewall in front of mailcow, please make sure that these ports are open for incoming connections:
| Service | Protocol | Port | Container | Variable |
To bind a service to an IP address, you can prepend the IP like this: `SMTP_PORT=1.2.3.4:25`
**Important**: You cannot use IP:PORT bindings in HTTP_PORT and HTTPS_PORT. Please use `HTTP_PORT=1234` and `HTTP_BIND=1.2.3.4` instead.
### Important for Hetzner firewalls
Quoting https://github.com/chermsen via https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/issues/497#issuecomment-469847380 (THANK YOU!):
For all who are struggling with the Hetzner firewall:
Port 53 unimportant for the firewall configuration in this case. According to the documentation unbound uses the port range 1024-65535 for outgoing requests.
Since the Hetzner Robot Firewall is a static firewall (each incoming packet is checked isolated) - the following rules must be applied:
**For TCP**
```
SRC-IP: ---
DST IP: ---
SRC Port: ---
DST Port: 1024-65535
Protocol: tcp
TCP flags: ack
Action: Accept
```
**For UDP**
```
SRC-IP: ---
DST IP: ---
SRC Port: ---
DST Port: 1024-65535
Protocol: udp
Action: Accept
```
If you want to apply a more restrictive port range you have to change the config of unbound first (after installation):
Especially relevant for OpenStack users: Check your MTU and set it accordingly in docker-compose.yml. See **4.1** in [our installation docs](../i_u_m/i_u_m_install.en.md).
