Enhancement Hacks - power of filters & always_bcc

[gsilver]

Zimbra is absolutely wonderful and I look forward to some much needed enhancements but until then I thought I would share some of my simple/hacky yet effective steps I have taken to accomplish specific tasks.

fyi: I'm running open source edition on Ubuntu 6.10 LTS, 40 Users (EDIT: 6.06 rather)

"Archive All" Email Account
always_bcc to an internal address archiveall@mydomain.com in main.cf
http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html (search for always_bcc)

Keyword review
As a financial firm we need to have a method of flagging certain terms appearing in the body of e-mail for review. Using filters in my archiveall@mydomain.com account I can create folders and tag items containing keywords in the body of the message
Filters can be very powerful. My only wish would be to be able to setup procedural "groups" of filters so that I could use more powerful logical conditions.

Internal E-Mail
While the solutions I have seen for this involve a little too much customization for my taste (I hate it when upgrades break or remove functionality I added through hacking), I have a "good for the time being" solution for our interns here.
ALL interns email address' maintain the same email naming convention as everyone else plus a ".intern" appended to the name (e.g. "John Doe" jdoe.intern@mydomain.com)
They are instructed to not send email to external accounts. archiveall@mydomain.com has a filter that says the following

if all of the following conditions are met, flag it
From contains ".intern@mydomain.com"
To does not contain "@mydomain.com"


I have to run now and get back to work but I thought I would share and hopefully get a thread going of similar tips / improvements to my own to help out fellow administrators.


-Gavin

[gsilver]

bump.. above post was broken i think for a bit but now is fixed..

please share your thoughts!

[phoenix]

I think you should rename you "Catch All" title in your first post, a 'catch all' email address is something completely different and we do have a method of creating one via the command line. I guess yours is a type of Archive Account?

[gsilver]

you are right... it is an archive account,

my original purpose for this type of account was to quickly resolve the lies of "omg my email is missing and i swear i did not delete it"

but after realizing the power of filters on what is equal to an "all mail" account i saw many more uses of such an account

[phoenix]

Yes, it's certainly a good idea. There is an archiving facility available for the Network Edition but this is a good idea for the OSS version. You might also like to look at the zmmsgtrace tool for ...erm tracing messages through the system.

[fajarpri]

Hello Gavin,
I'm not sure I'm not following you. I understand about the always_bcc in postfix. But I don't understand the filter. How do we implement the filter?
Cheers.

[gsilver]

Hey there!

1. Create an account that will have a quota large enough to get copies of ALL mail. (e.g. archiveall@yourdomain.com)
2. Set "always_bcc" to that address.
3. In the admin view, "view mail" as archiveall@yourdomain.com (or alternatively; login directly as that account)
4. Go to "Options"
5. Go to "Mail Filters"
6. Set rules accordingly.

Hope that helps.. Let me know if you are still having trouble.

[fajarpri]

Now I understand it.
Good work! Creative thinking!
Nice.

[ideallife]

Originally Posted by gsilver

Hey there!

1. Create an account that will have a quota large enough to get copies of ALL mail. (e.g. archiveall@yourdomain.com)
2. Set "always_bcc" to that address.
3. In the admin view, "view mail" as archiveall@yourdomain.com (or alternatively; login directly as that account)
4. Go to "Options"
5. Go to "Mail Filters"
6. Set rules accordingly.

Hope that helps.. Let me know if you are still having trouble.

Let's say the quota is reached... Does the intern get an email back? If no, how did you prevent that?

[phoenix]

You would have been better starting a new thread about this as the behaviour has changed since this thread started.

Originally Posted by ideallife

Let's say the quota is reached... Does the intern get an email back? If no, how did you prevent that?

The user will get a warning message when the quota is getting close to full, if it goes that far then incoming mail will eventually get bounced. The way to prevent it is give the user a larger quota.