Where do I start?

[dlochart]

First of all I have been playing with Zimbra for 2 days and I love what I see. I think Zimbra is the way we need to go for us and our clients. There is some functionality we wish to add. I have read up on zimlets but I do not think all of what we need to do can be done with a zimlet. For that I have these questions.

1) We currently plan to use/deploy the network version however I see that only the Open Source version is available via SVN. If what I want to change is in the network version am I screwed? If I find I need to extend some code how can I do that to affect the network version?

2) Initially what I need to do is implement a mail attachment policy. Currently attachments are either allowed or the whole message is bounced if the attachments are not allowed. I want to be able to have a policy that strips attachments (saves them off somewhere else) and replaces it with a message or do something else. I have this feeling that a zimlet won't do (well I may be wrong). I would need to apply this policy either when the attachments are selected or when the message is already in route to the MTA for delivery.

So can someone point me in the right direction.

Will I be making a zimlet for this or modifying base code?

Besides staring at the code for hours and hours is there a better way to find out where this type of logic would take place to narrow my focus.

thanks in advance

Doug

[KevinH]

1) 99% of the code in in SVN only items like the connectors and extensions are not included. So patches/changes to the SVN tree can almost always be applied to the Network code. If you find that doesn't work for you send us an email (sales@ or support@) and we can talk about specific options

2) This should happen at the MTA layer. So need to add a content policy in postfix. Try searching on policyd as a start.

[dkarp]

Originally Posted by KevinH

2) This should happen at the MTA layer. So need to add a content policy in postfix. Try searching on policyd as a start.

Doing something with postfix is probably the best solution. If that's not workable for some reason, you may also be able to do this by creating an extension that registers a new MimeVisitor subclass as a message mutator.

[dlochart]

Thanks for the direction. Is there a WIKI or other posting that covers making an extension as you propose. Is this extension A Zimlet or are there other (documented or not) ways in which to extend Zimbra.

Thanks again and if you are celebrating today have a very Happy and safe Thanksgiving

[anand]

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12463#c1

[dlochart]

Not trying to sound dense but the bugzilla link above was not extremely clear to me. Am I to glean from this that a bug was posted concerning the lack of documentation for extending the system? If so was the outcome to be status quo or will there be more docs?

thanks

[phoenix]

There's a link in the bug report that points you to a server-side extension documentation page.

[dlochart]

I see it now. When I read "... documented elsewhere." I did not bother looking at the link as it led me think it was mired deep in some developers offline storage or something.

thanks

[uxbod]

Take a look at MailScanner http://www.mailscanner.info

It integrates fine with Postfix and will do what you need. All you will need to do is change the main.cf so that all emails go into a hold queue, MailScanner will then process these and pass them back into the inbound queue so that Zimbra can process them.

As suggested earlier, also look at Policyd as you can start to Greylist based on whether the connection is a dialup/adsl user as that will help to reduce spam.

Some links for you :-

PolicyD
Restricted Greylisting
Image SPAM blocking via Spamassassin

Hope this helps.

[dlochart]

Originally Posted by uxbod

Take a look at MailScanner http://www.mailscanner.info

I am looking at it but documentation is bleak. I am not a network engineer or sys admin and it seems to talk directly to that audience so I am lacking in alot of the background.

Originally Posted by uxbod

It integrates fine with Postfix and will do what you need. All you will need to do is change the main.cf so that all emails go into a hold queue, MailScanner will then process these and pass them back into the inbound queue so that Zimbra can process them.

This sounds great but how? I looked in the main.cf and I am now combing the postfix site and the only thing I can see is changing the content_filter line which now is set to amavisd-new. I know I do not want to change that setting.

I don't see anything on a holding queue and I am not sure how queues are implemented anyway. How do I make postfix send the mail to a holding queue? I know this is probably not the correct forum for this.

I enjoy learning new things but it pisses me off that I get these tasks that I have little background in that have to be done in 2 weeks. Sorry for the rant GRRRR