Connecting external mailboxes to Zimbra
Few large enterprises can boast of being large initially. Many large retail chains, integrators, developers and ISPs started their business with small offices and a couple of dozens of employees who worked hard on the future success of their company. Of course, in such small enterprises, the question of implementing your own mail server or collaboration system is extremely rare, and employee mailboxes, as a rule, are created in public email services like Yandex mail or gmail. However, when an enterprise reaches a certain stage in its development and comes to the need to create its own mail server based on Zimbra, the question arises of connecting old mailboxes to new accounts.
Since the development of an enterprise almost always implies an active advertising campaign on the Internet, distribution of business cards indicating e-mail, as well as adding a mailing address to various directories, the flow of letters from potential or active customers usually does not weaken even years after changing the current mailing address. Of course, you can make it an obligation for an employee to check the old mailbox every day, however, a more smart solution would still be to combine the two mailboxes into one. In addition to saving staff time and effort, this solution will help you quickly move to a new mailbox completely, because now the answer to each letter will come from a new email address.
The easiest option for connecting an external mailbox to Zimbra at first glance seems to be setting up mail forwarding from the old account to the new one. However, this method has a number of problems. In particular, due to the spam filter and antivirus built into Zimbra, a letter or some attachments may simply not reach the new address. In addition, some services may simply not support the sending of emails, and completely relying on them in such an important issue is also not a good idea.
That is why it would be most appropriate to assign the task of receiving mail from external mailboxes to a server controlled by you. However, there is a small problem, because there are no built-in utilities for working with external mailboxes in Zimbra Collaboration Suite. However, this will not be a big problem, because Zimbra can work perfectly with third-party programs and utilities. That is why to receive mail from external addresses, you can use the fetchmail program , which is available in the repositories of most Linux distributions.
After the package manager completes the installation of fetchmail, it will be necessary to bring to the following form in the / etc / default / fetchmail file and, if necessary, uncomment the lines START_DAEMON = yes andset daemon 600 . In the first line, we enable fetchmail to run as a system service, and in the second line we set the interval for accessing the external mailbox in seconds. In this case, this parameter is 600 seconds and this means that the mailbox will be automatically checked every 10 minutes. This interval can be increased to reduce the load on the server, or can be reduced if you want the letters to arrive as quickly as possible.
After that, it remains only to specify in fetchmail the data for connecting to external mailboxes. For example, suppose that the utility will connect to the manager@gmail.com mailbox , and then forward mail to manager@company.ru. To do this, we need to first create the fetchmail configuration file, and then make a number of changes to it. You can do this using the cp /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/examples/fetchmailrc.example / etc / fetchmailrc command.
After that, open the / etc / fetchmailrc file in any text editor and specify authorization parameters for connecting to external mailboxes at the end of the file data of our external mailbox:
For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of the company "Zextras" Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com
Since the development of an enterprise almost always implies an active advertising campaign on the Internet, distribution of business cards indicating e-mail, as well as adding a mailing address to various directories, the flow of letters from potential or active customers usually does not weaken even years after changing the current mailing address. Of course, you can make it an obligation for an employee to check the old mailbox every day, however, a more smart solution would still be to combine the two mailboxes into one. In addition to saving staff time and effort, this solution will help you quickly move to a new mailbox completely, because now the answer to each letter will come from a new email address.
The easiest option for connecting an external mailbox to Zimbra at first glance seems to be setting up mail forwarding from the old account to the new one. However, this method has a number of problems. In particular, due to the spam filter and antivirus built into Zimbra, a letter or some attachments may simply not reach the new address. In addition, some services may simply not support the sending of emails, and completely relying on them in such an important issue is also not a good idea.
That is why it would be most appropriate to assign the task of receiving mail from external mailboxes to a server controlled by you. However, there is a small problem, because there are no built-in utilities for working with external mailboxes in Zimbra Collaboration Suite. However, this will not be a big problem, because Zimbra can work perfectly with third-party programs and utilities. That is why to receive mail from external addresses, you can use the fetchmail program , which is available in the repositories of most Linux distributions.
After the package manager completes the installation of fetchmail, it will be necessary to bring to the following form in the / etc / default / fetchmail file and, if necessary, uncomment the lines START_DAEMON = yes andset daemon 600 . In the first line, we enable fetchmail to run as a system service, and in the second line we set the interval for accessing the external mailbox in seconds. In this case, this parameter is 600 seconds and this means that the mailbox will be automatically checked every 10 minutes. This interval can be increased to reduce the load on the server, or can be reduced if you want the letters to arrive as quickly as possible.
After that, it remains only to specify in fetchmail the data for connecting to external mailboxes. For example, suppose that the utility will connect to the manager@gmail.com mailbox , and then forward mail to manager@company.ru. To do this, we need to first create the fetchmail configuration file, and then make a number of changes to it. You can do this using the cp /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/examples/fetchmailrc.example / etc / fetchmailrc command.
After that, open the / etc / fetchmailrc file in any text editor and specify authorization parameters for connecting to external mailboxes at the end of the file data of our external mailbox:
poll imap.gmail.com protocol IMAP
user manager@gmail.com is manager@company.ru here
password *********
keep
ssl
After that, it remains only to restart fetchmail by sequentially entering the service fetchmail stop and service fetchmail start commands, and then test the service by sending a test letter to an external mailbox. Thus, even after introducing your own Zimbra mail server at the enterprise, you can save the company from having to inform customers about the change of mail address. For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of the company "Zextras" Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com