Imported mail has blank FROM: address

My client has an old Exchange 5.5 server without the Internet connector. Since there is no Internet connector, accounts do not have SMTP addresses like joe.smith@example.com. When I import mail from this Exchange server into Zimbra 3.0.0_M2_740 and then view the user's Inbox with the Zimbra webmail client, the FROM: addresses are empty. Opening a particular message will show the FROM: address as:
"Joe Smith"

I assume that Zimbra is looking for a fully-qualified email address of the form joe.smith@example.com. Since it only finds "Joe Smith", it decides not to display anything.

I have searched the forums and found no other posting relating to this. Has anybody else seen this problem? Is there a workaround?

If the message was from an MS Exchange recipient, the MAPI message contains the Exchange address (the DN of the user in the directory). Via the address book provider, we access the address entry for the user and attempt to extract the SMTP address. If for whatever reason, that recipient is not found by the address book provider, we cannot extract the SMTP address of the user.

The migration wizard doesn't retain the display name when there is no SMTP address because that is a violation the address specification as described in Section 6 of RFC 822 or section 3.4 of RFC 2822.

This is bug 492 (closed as WONTFIX).

Hi Sam,

Thanks for the followup. I should have mentioned in my original post that the messages were migrated via IMAP, not the Migration Wizard. But I guess that doesn't change the fact that it's still a violation of the relevant RFCs. Thanks again.

I'm thinking of writing a bash script that will loop through all of a user's messages and use sed to replace "FROM: Joe Smith" with "FROM: joe.smith@example.com" (and likewise for the other 94 addresses on the old Exchange server). Are there any unintended consequences of modifying the .msg file after it has been indexed by Zimbra? Thanks in advance.

This wont help you much. The "from" field is cached in the database and is part of the lucene index. Simply modifying the mime message wont give you the functionality you are looking for.

After you run your script you could re-index the mailbox to update the lucene index.

The database will remain inconsistent with the blob store and the lucene index. Manually modifying the database is probably not a good idea.