Common mailbox (or mail account) for some users

[santiago78]

Hi everyone.

This is my first post, I hope I'm not posting in the wrong subforum.

First of all I want to said that before making this post, I've been searching for an answer to my question around the forum, but although I've found some post that talks about similar subjects like share folders, I couldn't find a clue to resolve my situation.

Let's see. I'm the IT responsible of a small office with 6 persons working. Each person has it's own mail account @mydomain.com.ar and we have a couple of common mail accounts that are used (to read and send) by some users like info@mydomain.com.ar support@mydomain.com.ar etc
All this system is implemented with an small IMAP server that runs under Windows, and Outlook 2003 in the workstations. Each Outlook has to be manually configured by the user adding it's own account and the common accounts that he/she need to read (I tried building scripts to do this automatically but it didn't work always as I expected). Outlook is a disaster for IMAP accounts, only to mention that I've got to build a VBA script to automatically copy every email sent from one of these common accounts to the correct Sent Items folder from the IMAP account because Outlook stores every sent mail automatically in the Sent Items folder from the primary account (that could not be an IMAP account, only POP3 account or Exchange).

Well, I started to evaluate solutions a month ago. I tested Egroupware, Open-Xchange, Google Apps and finally Zimbra (I test Zimbra at last, because Egroupware and Open-Xchange were easy to get using OpenSUSE because the RPMs are in repositories that can be search at software.opensuse.org/search).

Zimbra seems the best of the products I mention, and the most versatile one.

My problem is that I cannot understand if it's possible to create this common accounts and associate them with the users that are allow to read them and send email using them.
Also I need (if it's possible) that when a user sends an email through one of this common accounts, the email sent it has to have in it header that it's sent by "user@mydomain.com.ar in the name of info@mydomain.com.ar" for example.
We received emails from some companies that have common accounts and they have this way to specify in the header which employee has taken the charge of answering the email from the common account.

I would appreciate if someone could tell me if the needs that I've got at my company can be satisfied with Zimbra, and if the answer is YES, then I need to know how to.

I've forgot to mention that I've installed Zimbra 5.0.6.

Regards from Argentina.

Santiago

[alexkelly]

We are accomplishing this by setting up shares and personas. We will set up a common account (info@domain.com) and then share that mailbox to the people who will be managing it. In most cases, we don't actually have a login for info@domain.com, so we set the shares up administratively from the command line.

Then on the user's side, you can set up a persona for info@domain.com, which will let them reply as the user and have a different reply-to address.

[santiago78]

Thanks for your reply alexkelly.

So, I've got to use zmmailbox from command line to do what I'm needing. Right??? Or there is a way to do it through the web administration interface?

Note: Same as your case, we don't have and need login for the common accounts, logins are one per human being.

This wiki I've found, it might help me?
Zmmailbox - Zimbra :: Wiki

Santiago

[alexkelly]

You don't have to use the command line. Instead you could go from the admin console, "view mail" on the info@domain.com user, right click on each folder you want to share and choose "Share Folder". Then the person to whom you have shared the folder will get an email, and you can either "View Mail" as that user and accept the share, or allow them to accept it on their own.

In our case, we have so many people that access the share, it becomes a hassle to do it from the gui, so I do a quick shell script like:

for x in `cat listofusers`
do
zmmailbox -z -m accounttoshare@domain.com mfg "/folder to share" account $x@domain.com rwidx
zmmailbox -z -m $x@domain.com cm "/Shared Folder Name" accounttoshare@domain.com "/folder to share"
done

So if you had 6 people that you wanted to share the same resource, you could just loop through a list and do the same commands over until they are all shared.

[santiago78]

Well, I tried shared folder from the GUI and I did it with success (thanks alexkelly for your instructions), but I found that Shared Folders is not what I'm looking for, because Shared Folders allows a user to see emails from this common accounts like info@mydomain.com.ar but it doesn't allow to create and send a new email using this common account.
As for testing share folders using GUI, I had to create a user for the common account, and after I found that Shared Folder is not what I need for my company, then I took advantage of the common created account info@mydomain.com.ar and I tried to add as external account for the test user I created (santiago@mydomain.com.ar).
Doing that, I discovered that when I log as this test user, I can read the info@ inbox, and I also can send mails using info@ account, I also have the contacts, calendar, etc, etc.
The only problem with this method, is that it's the user responsability to choose the account from which he/she wants to send the email. Zimbra doesn't recognize that if the user is standing at info@ inbox or outbox and press the New Mail button the account from which the mail has to be send it the info@ and not the default user account.
Another thing I don't like very much about this, it's that I don't see a solution to the problem that we're having now at the office with IMAP account shared, that is if one user sends an email from the info@ account and the user doesn't sign it at the end, the recipient sees that the mail it's sent from info@ and nothing else, so it cannot know which person of the office sends the email. That's why I asked in my first post, if it's possible with common accounts that for example my test user sends an email using info@ common account and the email's envelope goes out with something in the header saying: "santiago@mydomain.com.ar in the name of info@mydomain.com.ar", so the recipient could know which person of the office sent the email using the common account.
Perhaps all the things I mentioned have a solution in Zimbra, but as I'm a newbie I really don't know, although I'm still investigating reading a lot from this forum, wiki and googleing.

If someone is using common accounts in the way I described, and want to post his/her experience, I think it'll be useful to me.

Thanks in advance.

[hesperant]

I have been having this problem as well.
We have a company with several email addresses setup as personas on a generic account
The addresses and generic account are to centralize simple things like sales or support handling.
When my users send an email they cannot send the email as the email address from shared box. Is there a solution?

I see hints and allusions to the solution but cannot find the solution itself.

[bdial]

Bug 22819 – reply to another user's message is always on-behalf-of

good news is it looks like theres some activity on this bug