Zimbra for calendar only and email sent to outside server

[dillweed]

I'm not sure this has been posted before, but I wasn't sure what to search for...so here goes.

I not the admin in our network, but I've been asked to set up an email server using Zimbra, mainly because I have more experience on *nix systems than the real network guy (which is sad). Plus, we wanted something free and non-microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a newbie and most of the time I'm flying by the seat of my pants, but I'm learning and that is what matters, I suppose. We had a Zimbra server going previously, but I think we didn’t have the dns server setup correctly. As a result, 3 or 4 weeks down the road we began to have problems with outlook and mail getting stuck in the outbox.

I'm not really sure how to ask this question, but I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with a split dns setup and the master dns server is on a windows 2003 server. I think the dns server is setup correctly for the most part, but I’m not sure about the windows 2003 server. (I still can’t ping internal clients, but the internal MX record resolves correctly. For some reason bind9 doesn’t seem to forward requests to the main windows dns server.)

If I understand this correctly, we currently have our ISP do the work for our mail and the network admin doesn't want to change that. So, basically, if I’m getting this right the external MX record points to our ISP mail server. I'm trying to set up zimbra for the excellent calendar program, but need email alerts sent to the ISP mail server. The email part of zimbra will not be used and I won’t really need to receive email. I can relay the email via authenticated smtp to the ISP, but I can't seem to get the relay correct. In addition, the network admin doesn't want to have to keep authenticating to the relay server for each email and have his password hanging out there to get picked up. So what I'm trying to do is have the email server be its own dns server. If Zimbra can resolve the external MX record correctly, then there should not be a problem sending email.

So my question is will it work if I set up the zimbra to have a name of mail.fake.home and the external email goes to mail.realname.com? If, yes, will email clients think that email originating from zimbra at mail.fake.home is spam?

[ianpico]

Im started looking at Zimbra for the same reason - the calendar.
From what I can understand (and Im totally new to all this) is you wont really be able to do it like this because the calendar is tightly integrated with emails.
Zimbra would need to be able to receive emails for calendar invites to be able to set the calendar entries correctly.
So I cant see how you would be able to this while keeping Zimbra and ISP emails separate unless you can somehow set the ISP to look at received emails and say Oh this is for the Zimbra calendar and forward it to your Zimbra installation.

ps sorry if im totally off track

[dillweed]

No I think you are thinking along the same lines. I plan on shutting off the email portion of the web email system and only use the calendar. I think that is possible.

Thinking again about this situation some more, what I'm looking for is the ability have to have the email look like it is coming from the external domain name so it doesn't go into everyone junk folder in Outlook. I'm not sure if this is possible because the external domain name resolves to the external ISP servers. I think I can set up bind9 to mimic the external domain name. But then zimbra doesn't send the mail to the external ISP, because it sees everything as local and not external.

I hope this is making sense and that maybe someone knows if this is possible and how to set it up.

Thank you.