Topic: EMail Forwarding

[Elad Lachmi]

Hi all.
I want to setup my e-smith server so it forwards each e-mail to its
coresponding account on an exchange server.
Can anyone tell me how I can do that?
The exchange server is inside a firewall and I want to put my e-smith server outside the firewall and make it act as an extetion of the exchange server so the exchange server will not have to be directly connected to the internet.

[Leon Uys]

I have exactly the same situation and I want to know the best architecture to solve this problem. Do I create two IP's for the two mail servers? Do I just tunnel/filter the traffic? Do I simply forward to another domain? Any suggestions welcome.
Leon.

[Kelvin]

Hi Elad and Leon,

This is probably not the best way to do this but hey, it works for me.

The main reason I did this was because the b****y M$ ExPain server POP3 service keeps causing a GPF and killing itself every few days when trying to collect mail directly from the ISP mail server. However, due to the amount of work already done in setting up this particular site this particular way I wasn't keen in making major changes to the way ExPain was setup.

So, I setup an ESSG 4.1.2 server on the network and set it up to collect the mails originally meant to be collected by ExPain. I setup accounts on the ESSG server for each of the mail accounts being collected. Then I just set ExPain to collect (using the same buggy POP3 service) the mails from the ESSG server instead of the Internet. Now, although I'm still using the same POP3 service on the ExPain server, collecting the mail this way got rid of the 99.9% of the GPFs (still happens once in a blue moon, but the service will restart itself, so this is acceptable).

Hope this helps.

Kelvin

[Craig]

If your E-Smith server is also your internet server via dialup modem, ADSL, ISDN etc make sure you have 2 network cards installed. 1 will be for you internal network the other will be for your external network, unless you are using a dialup modem account.

Usually your ISP will be able to give you a permanent IP address and if they have delegated your domain all they do is point the MX (mail exchange record) for your domain to the permanent IP address which you have to setup on the outside network card. If you have a dialup modem account then your 'ppp' connection will have the permanent IP address allocated to it upon connection.

I the Server Manager all you then need to do is under "Email Retreival" there is an option for "Delegate Mail Server" put the IP address of your Exchange Server and Qmail will pass all your emails to that server for processing. You then create a SMTP connection from the Exchange Admin Manager to the E-Smith Server and Qmail will pass your mail on the the outside world.

You won't need to maintain 2 sets of email accounts and passwords if you forward all incoming mail to your Exchange Server.

I have set this up a few time already and works well and as you have stated you do not want your Exchange Server on the outside network for the world to hack.

If you want to get rid of your Exchange Server then a good alternative is a E-Smith Server running Twiggi Groupware.

Hope this is what you are after.

Regards
Craig

[Elad Lachmi]

You helped me alot, thanks Craig.
One more thing.....do the names of the accounts on the exchange server have to be the username@domain.com or just username?

[Craig]

Elad

If you are running Exchange 2K and Win2K/AD when you add a user to the system you will also be prompted to add an email box for that user as well. If you are running Exchange 5.5 you add your users to the system in User Manager and then you add the mailbox in the Exchange Admin Manager you will also have to assing the mailbox a valid NT account.

You will neet to make sure that each user has the correct SMTP address ie: if your FDN is somwhere.com.au then each user will need and email address of their username@somewhere.com.au. This address will need to be their primary address. You may also find that you will also need an alias address for each user on the Exchange server that incorporates the name of your server eg: username@fs1.somewhere.com.au

Basically all the E-Smith server does is sees email comming in to the system and then passes it all onto the Exchange server. You will still have to configure the Exchange server up as you would normally.

Good Luck!

Regards
Craig