Topic: Replying to group email addresses

[Peasant]

My situation is this. I have a group called 'office', which has the email address office@mydomain.co.uk. I have 3 users who are members of this group, and who need to get the emails. It works fine, but there is a small problem when a group member replies to an email in that no other member of the group can see that the message has been replied to, or who by.

I can get round it by configuring things at the mail client end. For example, in Mozilla Thunderbird, all the users who are members of office have an identity for office@mydomain.co.uk, and I set up a bcc address office@mydomain.co.uk for replies.

I just wondered if there was a server side solution to this, rather than have to configure each mail client individually.

Thanks.

[janet]

Peasant

Maybe approach this differently.
Instead of using a office group, configure office as a user.
Then configure each of the 3 other users email clients for IMAP, & use the same account details ie office.
This would typically require a email client config for the main users acct ie user1 (or user2 or user3) & for the office user account.
Whatever one user does to the office IMAP mail, the other 2 users will see.

I use this quite a lot without issues.

[Peasant]

Hi Janet,

I had thought about that, but was just curious to see if it could be done from the server. I can see there are pros and cons no matter how it is done. Thanks for your help.

[janet]

Peasant

I just wondered if there was a server side solution to this, rather than have to configure each mail client individually.

I had thought about that, but was just curious to see if it could be done from the server.

What I suggested (& do myself) is a "server side solution", all email (sent, received, archived) is stored on the server.
I do not know of other simple solutions.

[Peasant]

Yes, I agree it is. And it will work well too. But it means extra configuration at the client end (just like my current solution does). That's fine if you are on site regularly, but with this client I'm very rarely there, so making changes (for example if a user has to be removed or added to the group) isn't always easy.

Thanks again for your help.

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

IMAP shared account is a solution as pointed by Janet to make a clear name on the solution (IMAP). Not POP.


There might be also a way to use a bcc on the server side to get all email send by office@yourdomain copied to office@yourdomain.
see https://wiki.contribs.org/Qpsmtpd:bcc and by reading the plugin /usr/share/qpsmtpd/plugins/bcc; you might have what you want using  outgoing and/or per_recipient 1

[Peasant]

There might be also a way to use a bcc on the server side to get all email send by office@yourdomain copied to office@yourdomain.
see https://wiki.contribs.org/Qpsmtpd:bcc and by reading the plugin /usr/share/qpsmtpd/plugins/bcc; you might have what you want using  outgoing and/or per_recipient 1

Thanks. I'll have a look at that.

[mmccarn]

Mailman might be useful.  I believe that with Mailman you can:
- create a mailing list that accepts email from the public, which is then sent to all 'members' of the list (your 3 'office' users)
- configure the list so that staff 'replies' go back to the list email, which then forwards the response back to the originator using the list address as the 'from' address
- restrict users from joining or leaving the list on their own, but retain the ability to add or remove users administratively

With somewhat more effort you could also install a ticketing system like osticket, otrs, bugzilla, etc.