fetchmail

[psuter]

hi

i have just installed zimbra on FC3. i want my mailserver to recieve my mails from a pop3 server. so far i've ben using excheange with a third party software to recieve my pop3 emails and distribute them to my exchange users. (actually, that's just me, but as a student i get exchange for free, so why not try the advantage of having your onw server at home to keep your mail clients on all computers in sync)

anyways.. i have read in this forum, that under linux with zimbra i need to use fetchmail to achieve what i want.. but how do i do that?
whenever i search for fetchmail configuration i mainly find isp sites explaining what i have to put in my user directory, but i want fetchmail to downlaod all mails from the pop3 server and then send them right to the mta of zimbra so that zimbra can distribute all mails to the correct users according to their alias email addresses (actually, how do i set an alias with a different domain?)
i had it done like this on exchange and i want to do it like this on zimbra, because i also want to be able to send emails using my "official" email address on my non-local domain

maybe an example helps:
say my zimbra domain is zimbra.local and my email address is psuter@gmx.net (that's not my real email address, just an example )
now i want to set an alias in zimbra for psuter@gmx.net and i want to setup fetchmail to recieve my mails from pop.gmx.net and pass them on to zimbra so it can find the user having psuter@gmx.net as an alias and distribute the mails to him.

i hope i could more or less explain myself clearly and i hope even more, that there are some people on this board who wanted the same thing as me but where cleverer and made it work

i'd appreciate your help

kind regards
pascal

[KevinH]

This has a good how-to on fetchmail config:

http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/net...fetchmail.html

You can create an alias with the Admin UI. At this time you can't send mail as an alias but only recieve.

[psuter]

thanks for the link, it really is a nice tutorial ...

but now my main question is, which user do i need to forward my mails to, so that zimbra will distribute them to the right recipients? and which is "my" homdirectory where i'm supposed to store the .fetchmailrc file to?

cheers
pascal

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by psuter

but now my main question is, which user do i need to forward my mails to, so that zimbra will distribute them to the right recipients? and which is "my" homdirectory where i'm supposed to store the .fetchmailrc file to?

You need to configure fetchmail so that *it* passes the right messages into ZImbra. If you are fetching mail from multiple POP servers going to multiple users in Zimbra then you'd need to setup one for each. A more common appraoch is that your combining multiple POP accounts all into Zimbra. So in this case one fectchmail config can gather all the POP mail and deliver it to one user in Zimbra. The home dir is the user who will run fetchmail. You could use the zimbra user but it would be better to create a special user for this purpose.

[psuter]

ah great

i got it to work now

i have saved the .fetchmailrc file into the root's directory (if fetchmail where runing with a different user's account, you'd need to save it there.. soe the user who's home directory it should be saved to has to be the one who is runing fetchmail. root is actually not so secure, but this is just a test install, so security doesn't bother me too much at this moment.. )

the user's username to deliver the mails locally is the username in zimbra, not a unix user. so in the case of zimbra that'll be the zimbra email address of that user. obviousley, what i first wanted, that the mail is sent to zimbra and zimbra then decides which user it has to forward it to doesn't work. so i can't have one pop3 account which recieves mails to different users (through a catch-all rule) and then have fetchmail grab those mails from the pop3 an deliver it to zimbra where they should be spead to the different user's accounts. (or is that somehow possible?)

thanks for your help so far..
pascal

[Gysie2701]

Hi,

I managed to pop all messages from my webmail's server to a catchAll account called (pop@blah.co.za). How can I now distribute this accross to the different users. (i.e gysie@blah.co.za[/email]).

I did the forwarding from the pop@blah.co.za account, but it then forwards to everyone, and not just the specific user.

Thanks

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by Gysie2701

Hi,

I managed to pop all messages from my webmail's server to a catchAll account called (pop@blah.co.za). How can I now distribute this accross to the different users. (i.e gysie@blah.co.za[/email]).

I did the forwarding from the pop@blah.co.za account, but it then forwards to everyone, and not just the specific user.

Thanks

You'd need to write a script to parse the headers and the reload them into the accounts with SMTP or LMTP.

[Gysie2701]

Well I did it without writing a script...

My fetchmailrc looks like this:

poll mail.external.com port 110 protocol POP3 localdomains internal.com user mail@external.com password 'your_password' is *,

What the "localdomains" does, it tells fetchmail that it should consider the internal.com domain as a local domain.

So if you run fetchmail on the internal.com domain (probably on the zimbra machine), it will see internal.com as a localdomain.

I don't know if this is the perfect solution for multidrop mode, but I got it to work for me.

Comments will be appreciated for getting the best possible solution?