[SOLVED] POP/SMTP Zimbra Installation

[yacahuma]

Scenario:

10 windows Xp networked pcs connected connected to a cable modem

all computers send and receive email via external SMTP/POP server

Question:
Can I install zimbra so that all users get the email from zimbra and zimbra downloads the emails from the pop server??

Anything special I need to now?

Is there a video tutorial about this? This setup should be the most common for small business since otherwise I will need full time internet connection, right?

[dwmtractor]

Yes, you can do this quite easily. After you install Zimbra and get it up and working, install Webmin (Webmin), and use the fetchmail module to configure fetchmail to grab the mail from your external pop accounts.

1) In Webmin go to Servers > Fetchmail Mail Retrieval. Next to the button "Add Fetchmail server for user" is a text box; enter a local Linux user with sudo permissions (but NOT root or zimbra--create a new one if you haven't already), click the button, and up will come a dialog into which you can enter the mail server options. The mail server options need be entered only once for the whole process (unless you have accounts on more than one pop server)

2) At the bottom of this same dialog, enter the pop account (user id and password) for the first user, and the zimbra user that you want to get that mail. Instead of the defaults, choose "NO" for "leave mail on server" and YES for "Always fetch all messages." Then click the "Create" button. The server will be listed with the first account on the fetchmail configuration screen. If you want to test it at this time, you can by clicking the "Check all servers" link at the bottom.

3) Once you have the settings working for one user, click on the server name under "Server to poll" and your settings will be displayed again. Scroll to the bottom and click the "Add another user" button, and it'll refresh with the same stuff as before plus a new set of blank fields for your next pop user. Fill it in for the second user, click "Save", and repeat this step as many times as necessary.

It works very cleanly for me, and all the mail so retrieved is passed through the spam and virus filters.

Let us know if you have any difficulties with this.

Dan

[yacahuma]

Thank . I will try it. right now I am downloading ubuntu 6.06 server to start testing.

[dwmtractor]

If you're using Ubuntu this wiki might be helpful.

[yacahuma]

Thanks for the link. Will it still apply in my case?

there will be no connection from the outside world to the zimbra server. The users will connect to the zimbra server to read and send email(maybe) and the zimbra server will communicate with the external pop.smtp server to download the emails.


Should the users send email through the zimbra server or talk directly to the external smtp server?? How doe sit affects the configuration?

There are some very basic things that I am still confuse about.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by yacahuma

Thanks for the link. Will it still apply in my case?

there will be no connection from the outside world to the zimbra server. The users will connect to the zimbra server to read and send email(maybe) and the zimbra server will communicate with the external pop.smtp server to download the emails.

Well, at the very least the Zimbra box will have to be able to SMTP to the outside world, because otherwise it's MTA is locked. See below. You may also want to let your users https into the zimbra box to check their mail from outside.

Originally Posted by yacahuma

Should the users send email through the zimbra server or talk directly to the external smtp server?? How doe sit affects the configuration?

I'm sure you can find alternative opinions on this; my own opinion is that, since your users are already logged into the zimbra server to check their mail, you want them to be able to reply. Those messages are going to the outside world as whoever@yourzimbrabox.net. Since people "out there" are going to want to reply also, you need to allow incoming SMTP to your Zimbra server, which means it has to have a fully-qualified domain name that is registered with a public DNS somewhere as well.

To the best of my knowledge, you can't set up Zimbra to relay through an outside SMTP server so as to appear to have all messages coming from that other domain. This is primarily because the ISP that is hosting your other domain probably has check-before-send authentication on their own SMTP relay, and when your Zimbra's fetchmail is retrieving all your email, the check-before-send timing is probably not going to work for outgoing mail.

It may be worth asking Zimbra to come up with a way to authenticate SMTP in situations like this--I've seen others asking for it, but it may well be easier just to gradually migrate your users and your customers/contacts to the new domain. The simplest form of this is to take your current whatever.com domain and register a corresponding whatever.net which you then point to your zimbra servers. At least that's what I did.

Dan

[yacahuma]

The problem is that a small company does not usually pay for a full time static ip connection. All I have is a cable modem. If my internet is gone because the cable company decided to do some maintenance, then my mail server is gone.(this happens quite often)

That's why I have an external smtp/pop server. My provider is the one that has that full time connection to the internet.

Now internally I have the problem of having emails on each individual machine. and no calendar or contact sharing.

the idea will be to use zimbra to contains everyones email, calndar and contact sharing, but still use the external server to receive email.

[dwmtractor]

I can certainly sympathize with your problem. It doesn't only happen with cable. Until a couple years ago I had serious reliability problems with a T1, but I digress. . .

I can see two additional options. One, if your hosting provider is willing to add your Zimbra box's IP address to an allowed list for relay, then you can have your outgoing mail still go thru that host. Depending on how friendly and cooperative they are that is a possibility.

The other would be to consider hosting your email with one of the zimbra hosting providers that are out there--that way you'd actually have all the zimbra functionality in a place that's outside the unreliable connection. Of course, when your internet connection goes down you would have nothing again. . .

None of these is perfect, but it's all my Friday-tired brain can come up with!

[yacahuma]

I was able to install the product using the link you gave me. I bought the no-up service so I can have the zimbra server on the dmz of my network of my dynamically assigned ip address.

I created an account and was able to send an email from the account.


Right now I am unable to receive an email. When I send an email from another domain(ej google.com). I always get

"mailbox unavailable, user unknown"

I also try with other of my domains and get the same problem.


I guess somehow port 25 is not been seen through my router(i think) or could it be a configuration issue?


So, I can send email from my zimbra account but I cannot receive any emails.


Any ideas???

[yacahuma]

i just tried telnet mail.mydomain.com 25 and got a response

This was from another computer in the same network.