[Rtaxerxes]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is covered somewhere, I have been trolling the forums and googling, but I am getting a little confused on some of the terminology.

My current setup is:
I have a domain registered, lets say fiftynine.co.za and hosted by webhost. Since I am in South Africa, I only have 2GB of hosted space.
I have ADSL connection, no static IP, with a max upload speed of 512k. I have 10 users sharing this through an Ubuntu box acting as router, NAT and proxy.
I have an Exchange server set up that is basically allowing internal mail and that is syncing and backing up mail. Some users have desktops and laptops and the exchange server syncs their mail. This also provides some shared calendars and contacts using public folders.
My internal domain has been setup as fiftynine.local.

I would like to use Zimbra, partly because Exchange is a resource hog and expensive and doesn't talk nicely to the 5 Mac clients. Also Entourage is terrible. Sending internal mail required changing the mail account you used, and if you made a mistake, it would obviously not send out to the internet.

I am running a Zimbra VM on the linux server currently, and have set up accounts and shared calendars. I set that internal domain to fifty.nine. Now I need some help with mail. I tried to set up an external SMTP relay, but I am getting an error that my domain doesn't have an A or MX record.

Essentially I would like advice on how to set this up so that Zimbra would be available worldwide, and all mail functions available. I should be able to figure out passing Zimbra through Apache on the router, but as far as setting up my domain, I have no idea. I have read about split-dns, but I'm not sure what it achieves, two domains or 1 domain handled by different DNS servers...

Can I set up Zimbra to handle the domain fiftynine.co.za or must it be an arb domain because it is internal. I would still like to make use of my hosts mail servers for max reliability, becuase ADSL may be too slow and unreliable and power can be an issue in South Africa.

Please point me towards the best setup to achieve this.

Thanks in advance.