Using Zimbra with hosted email accounts

[jacktripper]

Hi, we are a very small company of 3 people and want to expand. We are looking at Zimbra as it seems an excellent product for our needs. However we want to set this up as I describe below. Is this possible?

We plan to start with Community Edition and expand as needed later when we grow.

Please forgive if someone has already asked this. I tried to search but could not find an appropriate thread. I was able to see a recent thread that allows postfix configuration to send emails via external account, but I need to understand if fetch and setting Email Clients to pop.xyz.lan (described below) will work or not?

Description:

We have our website hosted through GoDaddy, lets say xyz.com.
We are located at a location where we have a local network (through routers) that has a domain set to xyz.lan
Our emails are provided via GoDaddy which provides POP3/SMTP access.

Can we use Zimbra as an intermediary or a proxy so that we can do this:

Someone sends a email, that gets stored at GoDaddy. When we come to office next day and start our servers, the zimbra server picks up the email, and handles the email. The users now no longer use pop.xyz.com, but instead use pop.xyz.lan and smtp.xyz.lan to send and receive emails. Any email send to from say user@xyz.com email address is relayed via zimbra to our GoDaddy SMTP for that user. Additionally, we also store a copy of that email in archive so we can restore if needed or monitor communication as we will have contractors.

Also since GoDaddy requires authentication for SMTP/POP access, how to set that up per user?

Hope I clarified my request.

Thanks
Jack

[Spencer]

What your looking to do is to get a service called Store and Forward. I am not sure if GoDaddy support this.

What happends is that if you server is down (zimbra), it stores your email on your email server. Then when your server comes back up. It will then "forward" the email to that server. The drawback is that you still need to use your zimbra server for everything, so if your server is down, then you can't get your email.

My suggestion since you have only 3 employees. Just purchase 3 accounts on a zimbra shared host. Then you can access all your email.

Spencer

[dwmtractor]

Actually, Jack, on the receiving side it's a cinch--it's what I'm already doing. For the sending side I think it may not be, however. My own setup is illustrative:

1) I already had (and still have) a hosted domain, in our case hosted by Hurricane Electric (top-notch hosting at very affordable prices BTW, Hurricane Electric Internet Services - Internet Backbone and Colocation Provider). That domain is tractor-equip.com, and it's got our website and about 25 pop accounts, some of which are several years old and nobody wants to lose their addresses (but they'd love to lose the spam to those addresses!).

2) I set up a new Zimbra server on my own T1, and had AT&T point their DNS to an IP on that T1 for my new domain, tractor-equip.net. When you're paying for a T1, that DNS hosting is free; if you have a less-costly broadband connection you may need to pay for DNS hosting somewhere, but it's not that costly.

3) I set up Zimbra to send and receive mail on the tractor-equip.net domain, which it owns and runs from a mail perspective. Then I set up fetchmail on the Zimbra server (using Webmin--it's way easier than handling it thru the command line), so that fetchmail checks all my pop accounts every three minutes and forwards any messages it gets to the necessary users on the zimbra box--for example somebody@tractor-equip.com gets retrieved by fetchmail and sent to somebodyelse@tractor-equip.net. Beauty of this is that all the POP mail gets routed thru Zimbra's spam filters on the way in.

4) The users just check their mail at their tractor-equip.net addresses, using IMAP clients or the web interface. When they send mail, it gets sent out over Zimbra's SMTP server (the tractor-equip.net SMTP) NOT the tractor-equip.com hosted SMTP. So all outgoing messages come from somebody@tractor-equip.net. This is necessary because most ISPs (any that aren't spam havens anyhow) won't relay mail without check-before-send or other authentication.

5) One consideration here is that I don't think you'd want to turn your Zimbra server off at night--let it fetch the mail day and night, and then when people send messages to somebody@yourzimbradomain.com, they'll get thru without an SMTP error.

I recognize this is only partially what you asked for, but it's a very workable situation if you are able to register a second domain (for example the .net to your current .com) for the server.

Dan