"Pending" Domains?

[matt.miller]

We frequently migrate customers from other mail systems into our hosted Zimbra platform, and I'm looking for a way to provision a whole domain including getting distribution lists and such all setup, but to have the domain be totally invisible until we "flip the switch".

The obvious answer to this is "don't change the MX record until you're ready", but that doesn't do any good for people actually on the same Zimbra system since Zimbra will attempt local delivery regardless of the MX record.

An OK approximation of this behavior can be had by juggling the Closed domain status along with Pending account statuses, but that's a good bit of fooling around and doesn't address Distribution Lists.

Is there a way to do this, perhaps by manually forcing Postfix to relay mail for domain x to a specific host even if it thinks it should be delivering it locally?

[uxbod]

Split Domain - Zimbra :: Wiki

[matt.miller]

I've used the steps outlined there to do a split configuration before, but that isn't quite what I'm looking to do here.

I want to have a domain with accounts, distribution lists, etc. provisioned in Zimbra, but have Zimbra essentially ignore them and route mail via the prevailing MX record in DNS (or via a static smarthost value that I can define, that's OK too.)

I've been able to do this by configuring a split domain as described in the article and then marking every single account in the domain as "Closed", but that isn't scalable.

I tried just setting the zimbraMailTransport value for that domain to the old system, but that setting alone doesn't seem to have an effect as the test messages I sent still went to the boxes on the Zimbra system.

Any other ideas?

[uxbod]

Hmmm, I thought that would have done it actually. What did you set the zimbraMailTransport value to ? When you sent the email how was it processed in /var/log/zimbra.log ?

[matt.miller]

I changed the zimbraMailTransport value for the domain in question to the old provider's MX value. Call it mail.thirdparty.tld.

So, I ran:
zmprov md testdomain.tld zimbraMailTransport smtp:mail.thirdparty.tld
postfix stop
postfix start

And then sent a message to user@testdomain.tld, a user which does exist on the Zimbra system. It was delivered to the local Zimbra mailbox, not the remote system like the zimbraMailTransport parameter would seem to force.

Here's a relevant log snippet:
Feb 2 23:24:45 zimbra postfix/lmtp[22338]: 7DEFD9C14251: to=<user@testdomain.tld>, relay=zimbra.ourdomain.tld[xx.xx.xx.xx]:7025, delay=0.11, delays=0.03/0/0/0.07, dsn=2.1.5, status=sent (250 2.1.5 Delivery OK)

[uxbod]

Instead try

su - zimbra
zmprov ma user@testdomain.tld zimbraMailTransport smtp:mail.thirdparty.tld

[matt.miller]

I'll give that a shot and report back, but that still seems like it wouldn't scale too well and wouldn't account for properly relaying mail sent to distribution lists, etc.

But, I'll let you know if that at least does it on a per-account level.

[matt.miller]

OK, that does work for a single account.

Any ideas for how to sanely scale this up for a whole domain though? Also, I still don't think that this will force a relay to non-Account addresses in the domain, e.g., distribution lists.

Thanks for the help.

[uxbod]

Hmmm ... it should do when the DL is expanded. I think you will need to set those details for each account as Zimbra is the final hop for that domain Postfix assumes that it is authoritative for it. You could easily script it.

[olecoot]

Not to step on anyone's toes here. But this is what works for us. As long as DNS is working properly.

If you want the Zimbra server to relay all mail destined for a particular domain (say, example.com) to another mta (say, other-mta.domain.com), you can forward the domain.

zmprov
md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllAddress @example.com
md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllForwardingAddress @example.com
md example.com zimbraMailTransport smtp:other-mta.domain.com

I think you can also do this as another way to make a sort of local domain alias:

zmprov
md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllAddress @example.com
md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllForwardingAddress @domain.com
md example.com zimbraMailTransport lmtp:zimbra.domain.com

For non-zimbra domains, this might prove useful as well: Transport_Table_for_external_servers