Saving emails to file

[i_magic]

I know it can be done, but I am just getting lost in all the settings...

My Zimbra server is on a local company network -- there is no connection to the Internet. I want to set it up to dump messages to file instead of trying to send them to SMTP.

Basically, I want to have 2 servers setup one on the outside and one on the intranet.

I need to configure them to dump messages to file and I will transfer the messages between the 2 manually (via USB stick).

I know it sounds dumb, but such is my life...

Any pointers to information on how this can be set up are appreciated.

DZ

[tim brennan]

You can't configure Zimbra to do it -- Zimbra can *only* send email via SMTP (defaults to port 25 locally, but can be configured via Admin Console).

You might be able to configure Postfix to do it, take a look through the Postfix docs.

Worst-case, you can hack up a dummy SMTP server that listens on port 25 and writes the messages out to a file -- you can do this in probably 50 lines of Perl using Net::SMTP::Server

[i_magic]

Hiya Tim,
Thanks for the idea. So, I can do a small proxy server that listens on some port (other than 25?) and once it receives SMTP connection, it reads all messages from Zimbra and dumps them into a local folder, for example.

Does Zimbra both send and receive messages via SMTP? (Sorry if I am aksing stupid questions, mail is not an area that I am strong at.)

Then I can basically write another script that reads messages from a local folder and passes them to Zimbra via SMTP. Does that sound reasonable?

I guess I better get my lunch-box ready -- it's time to go learn SMTP.

Lastly, how do I configure Zimbra to use relay host? relayhost = [192.168.1.100] ?

DZ

[tim brennan]

Zimbra sends via SMTP, but it receives via LMTP on port 7025. The two protocols are almost identical except (iirc) that LMTP handles queuing while SMTP doesn't...

Attached is a script that I wrote a while back that a lot of the devs here use internally for testing (since Postfix doesn't run on Windows) -- it listens on port 25 and writes local messages to LMTP on 7025, or fwds remote messages to a remote SMTP server. You should be able to adapt this pretty quickly for what you need.

[tim brennan]

Lastly, how do I configure Zimbra to use relay host? relayhost = [192.168.1.100] ?

Look in the admin console under Servers/YourServer/MTA Tab

[i_magic]

Hey Tim,
Thanks again.

OK, so I found a little python script, tweaked it a bit and voile, I now have outgoing messages being dumped to a local folder.

To set up relay host, I did:
/opt/zimbra/bin/postconf -e fallback_relay=[127.0.0.1]:9025
(9025 is the port on which my script is listening for incoming connections.)

One gotcha that I ran into is that before installing Zimbra, I already had postfix installed, so when I tried running postconf, it would modify main.cf in /etc/postfix/main.cf -- not the one that zimbra uses (/opt/zimbra/postfix/main.cf?). Zimbra installs its own postfix! Hence, full path in the above postconf.

How does Zimbra listen on port 7025? Does use one of the agents of the postfix?

Actually, to be honest, I am fully tracking how Zimbra integrates with postfix, ie how emails pass between zimbra and postfix, etc. If you could point me where I can read up on this, I'd appreciate it.

LMTP... Hmm, I hope I can figure it out from your script. Thanks in advance.

DZ