[SOLVED] Zimbra and local mail delivery with Postfix

[Openlink]

Hi everyone,

I'm a former Exchange admin just getting used to Zimbra, and I have one issue that I can't seem to figure out, and I don't know enough about it to make an educated search.

My Zimbra server is housed on the same server as my company Asterisk server running CentPBX 1.3 (CentOS 5). Zimbra works great for my corporate accounts and all mail flow seems to be working without any problems. The one issue I'm having is with my Postfix queue not delivering local/system mails and sending out e-mails from the Asterisk server (voicemails, etc). I currently have 31 items in my queue (/var/spool/postfix) and understand that the queue cannot send anything because Postfix is not running (outside of being the Zimbra user), so what is the workaround? I'm sure I'm not the first guy with this issue, but was not having any luck finding a solution in the forums or Google because I think my search terms probably sucked.

Thanks,

Colin

[dwmtractor]

Colin,

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "Postfix is not running (outside of being the Zimbra user)." Postfix IS running or not, for the whole box. It is a standard SMTP mail transport, and if you have the asterisk box's IP in your "allowed networks" for postix, it should accept the mail and transmit it. I have a setup where a Crystal Reports server and a Veritas Backup Exec box send mail to various users (both in and out of my domain) using SMTP, and they doesn't talk to the Zimbra-specific package at all--just relays mail thru the postfix part of the server. Making sure your server is willing to relay for that box is all it should take.

I'm not familiar with asterisk--the one question I would have is whether it perhaps tries to send mail by MAPI rather than SMTP. The Zimbra server is not a MAPI box. However if it sends them by SMTP you should be able to make it happen.

Cheers,

Dan

[Openlink]

Dan,

Thanks for the reply.

What I'm trying to convey (very poorly, this is why my searches didn't work) is that Postfix does run when started within Zimbra (I got the e-mail that there had been a reply to this post, and sending/receiving mails from within Zimbra work fine), but if i check the service status from Webmin or the command line (as root), it shows up as stopped. I assumed this was consistent with how a Zimbra install controlled Postfix.

Asterisk uses Sendmail (which is now disabled) for any correspondence, so it should be fairly seamless to move the operations over to Postfix. Same goes for local mail (cron daemon, log watches). Mails for these two functions now just sits in my outgoing queue for Postfix at /var/spool/postfix, and I don't know how to get them out or move them to the correct queue while updating it so that this problem is avoided in the future.

Colin

[dwmtractor]

Ohhhhh. . .NOW I get you! The issue is that Zimbra does not install Postfix in the usual spot. ALL of Zimbra's programs are under /opt/zimbra; in the case of Postfix the path is /opt/zimbra/postfix. Without changing your paths, neither Webmin nor Asterisk is going to be looking where Zimbra's postfix installation is looking.

I'm a little surprised you even have a /var/spool/postfix. Did you perhaps have another installation of postfix (independent of Zimbra) on this box before doing the Zimbra installation? Two competing copies of the same program could create all kinds of joy for you. . .

Does Asterisk have to send messages by dumping them in a spool folder, or can it send them to an SMTP port? If the latter, just route it to your Zimbra localhost address. If the former, since I'm no postfix expert I won't comment, but I imagine it's possible once you have the correct paths.

[Openlink]

Dan,

Thanks for all your help, all I needed to do was change the mail queue directory and everyone works as it should. I'm very impressed with the Zimbra/Asterisk setup and when NOT using Trixbox it seems work run flawlessly (I couldn't even get Trixbox and Zimbra loaded on the same server before...with 4GB of RAM).

Anyone else having this problem, the fix is simple via Webmin.

Go to Servers --> Postfix Mail Server
General Options
Find "Mail queue directory" and change it to /opt/zimbra/postfix

Voila!

Thanks for all the help, Dan.

Colin

[dwmtractor]

You're quite welcome, Colin. Welcome to the forums -- and Zimbra! Come back and see us often. . .