Stand Alone MTA

[bonoboslr]

I am struggling a little with setting up relaying for separate MTAs and would like any advice / documentation.

I have a seperate mailstore and mta. I would like to relay all mail out of the MTA and turn off the MTA on the mailstore.

How do I configure the mailstore to relay mail out via the MTA, and how do I configure the mta to relay mail for that mailstore?

I am not finding a lot of documentation on how to do this.

Thanks

[Jesster]

Hi bonoboslr,

We have a similar setup. We still have MTA service on mailstore server, I think this is required. To have mailstore relay to your MTA, try this:

zmprov ms zmailstore.example.org zimbraMtaRelayHost zmta.example.org:25

[uxbod]

bonoboslr from what you have said before you have a massive ZCS installation so an you leverage detailed support from your account manager ?

[bonoboslr]

Its not always necessary to log a support ticket, especially if it is a case of me being stupid and am simply missing something obvious. We are currently relaying everything out of our legacy qmail servers and this what i want to change. I implemented the above command on the mailstores and all mail goes there for relaying but how do i stop the mtas from then sending to our legacy servers? Do i remove the attribute with -zimbraMtaRelayHost?
I know this simple but i just dont seem to see the woods for the trees!

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by bonoboslr

I am struggling a little with setting up relaying for separate MTAs and would like any advice / documentation.

I have a seperate mailstore and mta. I would like to relay all mail out of the MTA and turn off the MTA on the mailstore.

How do I configure the mailstore to relay mail out via the MTA, and how do I configure the mta to relay mail for that mailstore?

I am not finding a lot of documentation on how to do this.

Thanks

If I understand what you are asking correctly, I think what you want to do can be accomplished straight from the Admin Console:


Step One:
Configuration > Global Settings > MTA tab, Network section.

Set the "Web mail MTA Hostname" parameter to the FQDN of your new MTA-only server.


Step Two:
Configuration > Servers > Select a Mailbox server > MTA tab.

The "Web mail MTA Hostname" parameter is the MTA server to which that mailbox server will route all outbound email generated by web clients. The default for single-server installs is "localhost".

This is different than the "Relay MTA for external delivery" parameter, which configures the mailbox server to use the MTA listed in that box only for non-local domains.

In your case, I believe what you will want on your mailbox-only server(s) is for the "Web mail MTA Hostname" parameter to be filled in with the FQDN of your new MTA-only server and for the "Relay MTA for external delivery" to be blank.

You'll need to repeat this step for each mailbox server in your farm.


Step Three:
On your new MTA-only server, be sure that same MTA configuration tab is configured identically to the mailbox server(s).


Step Four:
For all servers on that same MTA tab, make sure all the servers' IP addresses are listed in the "MTA Trusted Networks" dialog box.


Step Five:
Check your firewall rules allow inter-server traffic appropriately, then test!


I don't know what will happen if you try to remove the MTA bits from the current combination mailbox-MTA server. When we convert single-server Zimbra installs to multi-server, we leave the MTA bits in place on the original server. If we absolutely want to block SMTP traffic to that original, now mailbox-only, server, we use a firewall to block inbound port 25/465 traffic to the original server. I think there is also a benefit to keeping the MTA functionality on this server (see the P.S. section below).

Certainly on fresh, additional mailbox-only servers added to a Zimbra farm there is no /opt/zimbra/postfix directory, but removing the Zimbra MTA bits is another matter entirely.

Hope that helps,
Mark

P.S.

Other Items Which You May Already Know:

1. Be sure to configure your new MTA-only server as an LDAP replica when you do the install.
2. Don't forget to change the MX records for all of the domains on your farm to list the new MTA-only server as the primary MX.
3. Understand that if you do maintenance on the MTA-only server, all web client users will get an error message popup when they try to send emails.
4. If you want, you can keep the original combo MTA-Mailbox server's MTA functionality and list it as a backup MX in public DNS. If your MTA-only server barfs, then at least all inbound email will continue to flow, and if the MTA-only server is expected to be out of action for a while you can change each mailbox server's "Web mail MTA Hostname" parameter to point to the original combo server temporarily, until you get the MTA server back on line.