Zimbra as a Secondary Mail Server

[urtlking2jo]

Hi - I'm new to Zimbra, but have been eying it as a candidate to provide our small business with some great collaboration abilities. I'd like to leave our current mail server and mx record as is (because it is hosted and reliable), but I'd like to host a Zimbra server locally and pull mail from the 'primary' mail server into Zimbra for local distribution. I would plan for all employees to use Zimbra the vast majority of the time, but still have our 'primary' mail server in place in case the Zimbra server crashes or we lose Internet connectivity or other unforeseen issues.

I've searched the forums and Googled this, but have not found definitive information. The business I used to work for used Windows Small Business with Exchange and a pop3 connector to do essentially what I would like to do.

It appears that I could accomplish similar using fetchmail, but I am not a linux expert. Can anyone confirm that what I am trying to do is possible, and if it is, are there any good tutorials for this specifically or how to use fetchmail?

Thanks in advance,

Josh

[mmorse]

Welcome to the forums,
Search fetchmail and webmin - here's one: [SOLVED] Fetchmail from other servers (aka account aggregation)
Alternatively you might just use your old box as a backup mx; put the zimbra mx record with a lower priority number, and the old solution you setup as just a queue to hold mail. -you could even use another zimbra mta to do it
If your not migrating all at once/in one sitting, use a Split Domain - Zimbra :: Wiki

[urtlking2jo]

Thank you for the information. My 'old box' is the service that comes with our professionally hosted site (we run a couple of our own servers, but we're not quite comfortable hosting things that are entirely mission critical - like the primary website and mail. Our office does not have redundant Internet connections and our servers are somewhat home-grown.). How do I know if I can use my old solutions as just a queue to hold mail? Is that accessible if my Zimbra server was to experience a hard drive crash and take a couple of days to get up and going again?

I'd seen both of think links you provided. I understand a lot of what is being said, but since I haven't yet set up the box with Zimbra and I'm not entirely familiar with all of the 'mail services', it doesn't all entirely make sense. I'll probably just need to start playing around and testing things out I guess.

Thanks again.

[mmorse]

Don't forget that there's a multitude of zimbra hosting partners as well if you want to go that route who are well versed in hosting email
-They can help you migrate all your current mail & you essentially just point your domain's mx record at them, it's that easy.
I guess it does sound like you want a fetchmail setup or automatic forwarding from the main setup.
The backup mx thing would only interact with other mailservers after they attempt to send to your zimbra box first and can't find it - your users wouldn't connect/use it to read mail, it would just hold incoming mail until it could pass it off to your zimbra setup. Mailservers typically retry sending for 24-96hrs but a backup mx record is always a good idea so you don't miss out on anything.
Are you planning the network edition or open source edition? (compare editions)

[urtlking2jo]

We are a small, but growing company. We're definitely trying to use open source software to our advantage and keep costs low initially. For that purpose, we'll probably start out on the open source edition - but we'd like to gain the expertise of handling the hosting ourselves (we'd just like to have a solid back up plan in case the unexpected occurs!) and give back to the community when possible.