Binding account with external email service?

Hi, I've just installed Zimbra for my company and it works great, however there's one thing I'm not sure if possible with Zimbra. We use Zimbra for all internal e-mails and communications, but since everyone of use already have some external email accounts, so I wonder if I can bind accounts to external email service so when someone wants to send emails to the outside, it automatically uses his/her external mail account to send it.

For example, we have an employee named peter@mcomp.org in the Zimbra, he has an existing email peter@gmail.com, so is there anyway to configure his accounts, so when he sends email within the company to john@mcomp.org in Zimbra, the mail is sent with his zimbra account, but when he sends an email to an outside address bill@hotmail.com, it will automatically send the mail with peter@gmail.com via smtp.gmail.com?

Thanks.

Look in the Accounts/Persona tab in the User preferences.

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Originally Posted by phoenix

Look in the Accounts/Persona tab in the User preferences.

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hmm... for the admin page, there's no persona tab in the accounts settings. for the individual user preferences, there's an "external account" but that only receives email from external POP/IMAP server. the "new persona" doesn't seem to have any settings for mail server. I can't find where to config an external smtp server to send emails to the outside :confused:

Why would you want to relay it via another external server? The aim of the persona is to 'impersonate' the external mail id and send it directly from Zimbra with a return address of the external mail account.

well, because the internal server's address is not a certified mail server so it can't send mail to outside.

So there's no such functionality in Zimbra I guess? to route mails to external address via external mail service automatically?

Vote for / support ticket tag / cc watch this RFE: Bug 14526 - Support for using outbound SMTP server for identities

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Originally Posted by wellofsouls

well, because the internal server's address is not a certified mail server so it can't send mail to outside.

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I don't understand what that means, don't you deliver mail to other users from this server?

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Originally Posted by phoenix

I don't understand what that means, don't you deliver mail to other users from this server?

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yes I deliver mails to other users inside our company's internal network. The mail server has an internal address like 192.168.110.110, and an internal domain name mail.mycompany.org, but invisible to the outside world. So it can't deliver mails to accounts outside the company's internal network, for example abc@yahoo.com, xxx@gmail.com, etc.

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Originally Posted by phoenix

I don't understand what that means, don't you deliver mail to other users from this server?

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Why would you want to relay it via another external server? The aim of the persona is to 'impersonate' the external mail id and send it directly from Zimbra with a return address of the external mail account.

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And to further expand the point (from perhaps a different angle)...my server, for instance, is not a certified sender via SPF records for domains such as yahoo.com, gmail.com, etc. Nor does my server have domain-key certificates for those domains. So, when I send persona-based emails with a "from" of yahoo.com, gmail.com, etc...I am automatically lowering my deliver-ability chances dramatically depending on the settings of my recipient's mail service. In some cases, it will be rejected completely. The only solution that will allow personas to work in such an environment is an "add external smtp" option, such as being discussed in the bug listed above, to be associated with personas and/or "external accounts".