Receiving Mail from Pop3 accounts

[Valerion]

I am exactly in the same scenario. I work for one company, and contract out to a different company that we share infrastructure with, but act to clients as if I am an employee. So I have to be able to send out as either one role or another.

The only workaround so far is to have two separate mailboxes and send from both. Not the most ideal situation, but it gets the job done, and delegation makes that easier. Also, I get to keep the mails related to each role separate.

Of course if you have to do this on a larger scale it could mean a lot of extra mailboxes and licenses to manage. I am fortunate that we only have two such cases at the moment.

[florian]

Les,

Scenario one, all-in-all, sounds very reasonable to me - however these are SMTP aliases and the ability to choose from one that you're allowed to use. The only current way to model this in Scaix is create separate accounts for tracking possible sender addresses and allowing the person to send on behalf of the other person. That works. The problem with this is that it seems that Outlook - in MAPI mode - doesn't allow the user to preserve his selected FROM address - this is true for both Scalix and Exchange, btw. We could probably allow the user to select one of their From addresses in SWA, though and it's one of the things we're considering. Note that people would have a single inbox.

For the 2nd - and actually third scenario - I've worked as an IT contractor at a number of larger firms where I had a corporate eMail address, including HP and Sun. All these folks would never have throught of allowing outbound POP or IMAP traffic from their networks for security reasons. All I ever got was outbound http - so I was able to check my external email using webmail. Even more so, in the cases where they might allow the protocols from a networking point of view, they would certainly not want to allow that traffic to be flowing directly in the Inbox of your corporate mail system, through the client. This would basically bypass most of your corporate eMail hygiene (spam, antivirus) infrastructure, which are normally sorted out on a gateway level. For larger companies I see this as a complete no-starter, now, if I was either the IT responsible person or a consultant looking at the setup, this would be nothing I would even consider to allow.

The same is true for the personal mailbox case. And as it's IT security related, I'm afraid, and as hard as this might be to implement in practice, this would need to include the GM as well.

Can you - and others give me some thoughts on that? Note that this is *not* "official Scalix thinking" on what users should/must do (we don't have such a thing, but hopefully listen to our customers), but that's my own experience in >10 years of doing, implementing and designing email in organisations of various size. Also please note that I'm not only European, but even German and that probably makes me a bit more paranoid than average on security issues.

Cheers,
Florian.

[les]

Les,

Scenario one, all-in-all, sounds very reasonable to me - however these are SMTP aliases and the ability to choose from one that you're allowed to use. The only current way to model this in Scaix is create separate accounts for tracking possible sender addresses and allowing the person to send on behalf of the other person. That works. The problem with this is that it seems that Outlook - in MAPI mode - doesn't allow the user to preserve his selected FROM address - this is true for both Scalix and Exchange, btw. We could probably allow the user to select one of their From addresses in SWA, though and it's one of the things we're considering. Note that people would have a single inbox.

For the 2nd - and actually third scenario - I've worked as an IT contractor at a number of larger firms where I had a corporate eMail address, including HP and Sun. All these folks would never have throught of allowing outbound POP or IMAP traffic from their networks for security reasons. All I ever got was outbound http - so I was able to check my external email using webmail. Even more so, in the cases where they might allow the protocols from a networking point of view, they would certainly not want to allow that traffic to be flowing directly in the Inbox of your corporate mail system, through the client. This would basically bypass most of your corporate eMail hygiene (spam, antivirus) infrastructure, which are normally sorted out on a gateway level. For larger companies I see this as a complete no-starter, now, if I was either the IT responsible person or a consultant looking at the setup, this would be nothing I would even consider to allow.

The same is true for the personal mailbox case. And as it's IT security related, I'm afraid, and as hard as this might be to implement in practice, this would need to include the GM as well.

Can you - and others give me some thoughts on that? Note that this is *not* "official Scalix thinking" on what users should/must do (we don't have such a thing, but hopefully listen to our customers), but that's my own experience in >10 years of doing, implementing and designing email in organisations of various size. Also please note that I'm not only European, but even German and that probably makes me a bit more paranoid than average on security issues.

Cheers,
Florian.

Yeah i definitely agree with your comments. Security is always a concern. The bigger companies would never allow it.

But its the end users you need to please, and some of them are unreasonable and uncaring about security no matter how much you drill it into them that what they want is a bad idea. ;)

Its good to be paranoid, if only the end-users were also we might not have as many issues ;)

In the two or three cases i've come across i have overcome with fetchmail and using outlook for pop and the scalix webclient for scalix.
So my client issues are "worked around".

Its just one of those things that'd be nice to have as a feature, but i wouldn't be encouraging it due to the security implications.

Thanks for your input.

[ausyvr]

Our situation is the Scenario One. We own many different domains and some departments need to send out from a specific email address (info@domain.com) to many people. There is no way these workers want to reveal their work email address.
In Outlook you can select who the email is being sent from, but when the receiver reads the email, the From field will have your work email address rather than (info@domain.com).
We also have external POP accounts hosted by other companies (work related, not personal). These accounts need to be sent and received from the correct address in order for staff to work efficiently.

The few people we have on Scalix I will propose to them the use of Thunderbird for the external POP account after testing myself. What works for one person may not work for another person. We have a tech support department who needs to send and receive from a tech support email address as well as their own work email address, preferably all in one app.
It really comes down to what the managers want in each department. As an MIS department we provide solutions to the current problems. If Management dont like our solutions there is nothing we can do about it. Shame really, I loved Scalix, it was a break through for us.
But we need to look for the company needs as a whole not what 2 or 3 people want.

[kanderson]

All I can say is to talk to your reseller, and request that this feature be added. It's commonly requested (I've answered a similar request in another thread already today), but Outlook doesn't natively support it.

I'll open it as an enhancement request, but this isn't unique to Scalix. This is a problem with Outlook itself AFAIK.

Kev.

[enneris]

I read the whole thread, and understand that POP3 is usupported in Scalix setup, but, i had a POP acocunt set up and downloaded new mail on that account.

Are the messages lost?

The problem is, in my case, about users. I know i dont have to setup a pop account in the scalix profile. But do they? They will if i tell them, for 5 minutes untill they forget, or they will try "just to see what happens" .. so is there a way to get back the lost messages?

I wonder how Outllok can download mail without leaving a copy, and just send them in nowhere...

Thanks!

[a.schild]

I read the whole thread, and understand that POP3 is usupported in Scalix setup, but, i had a POP acocunt set up and downloaded new mail on that account.

Are the messages lost?

The problem is, in my case, about users. I know i dont have to setup a pop account in the scalix profile. But do they? They will if i tell them, for 5 minutes untill they forget, or they will try "just to see what happens" .. so is there a way to get back the lost messages?

We also have this problem. It would be very helpful if the installer does prevent adding POP3 accounts to a existing Scalix profile.

I wonder how Outllok can download mail without leaving a copy, and just send them in nowhere...

There are a lot of mysteries in the world....

[yakwakdo]

I was sitting around today contemplating all things IT when I decided to see if Scalix has made any progress with POP3 accounts. Imagine my suprise that this thread is still alive. I see florian still has two answers for this subject. 1- you shouldn't be doing this, and 2- there's another (unsatisfactory) way to (partially) accomplish your goals.

I like the idea of using a different email client that would give the API needed to accomplish my goal. I guess that's why Microsoft and Lotus wrote client software to work with their server software. How 'bout it Scalix? Is there any chance of getting a Windows based client to do email and calendar?

[matt_png]

First, it seems that corporate e-mail hygiene should not preclude allowing POP3 access to the outside since POP3 traffic can be scanned on the way through. We have this set up on our firewall and we wouldn't qualify as a "big" organization. It seems that many Linux based appliance type firewall/routers do this as well.

Second, another scenario where having access to multiple accounts would be "somewhat" normal is where staff fill multiple roles in the same organization. A single person may have several roles/titles/responsibilities with e-mail accounts associated with each; but it wouldn't be ideal for them to be aliases since a role/responsibility may be "moved" to another person.

Florian's IMAP only solution is perfect for this situation except that it doesn't allow for the calendaring and shared/public folder features of the premium accounts.

Currently we have an IMAP only setup with our "old" mail server, and some of our users handle as many as four or even five e-mail accounts in either Outlook or Thunderbird. We like the features that Scalix offers, but it's not a very good fit without being able to handle multiple accounts in Outlook in native MAPI mode.

From reading this thread it sounds like there is no easy solution. However, if a solution is reached, it would sure be a welcome breakthrough for lots of people! I hope you guys keep working on it.

Matt

[a.schild]

Hello Matt,

First, it seems that corporate e-mail hygiene should not preclude allowing POP3 access to the outside since POP3 traffic can be scanned on the way through. We have this set up on our firewall and we wouldn't qualify as a "big" organization. It seems that many Linux based appliance type firewall/routers do this as well.

POP3 can also be used via SSL (POP3S)

Currently we have an IMAP only setup with our "old" mail server, and some of our users handle as many as four or even five e-mail accounts in either Outlook or Thunderbird. We like the features that Scalix offers, but it's not a very good fit without being able to handle multiple accounts in Outlook in native MAPI mode.

We have recently converted a larger company from imap to exchange 2007.
There you also have the very same outlook problem, that you can't have multiple accounts in one profile.
For example the deleted items always go to the users recycle bin, and not the one of the account. Same for sent items etc. etc. etc.

André

[charlweed]

Scalix looked great, but it is critical for our Windows desktop users to download messages from an external pop server, and to send mail as the identity specified in the account.

We really REALLY wanted to get rid of Exchange, Active Directory, and the whole Microsoft mess. We tried different clients, but Evolution and Thunderbird are missing too many groupware features, and Evolution on win32 is too buggy even for mail.

Regarding the security concerns mentioned in this thread, pop mail would rank low on almost everybody's threat rank table, compared to say, web browsing. Not only can pop mail be secured and filtered within the network, there are many security products for the the desktop. Desktop security has too be there anyway.

In my personal opinion, the functionality of the "connector" could be expanded to have parallel communication with either the scalix or scalix-tomcat servers, to deliver or "forward" messages. If the connector was open-source, the community could even help in this effort.

Anyway, if Scalix ever gets around to providing this functionality, please send out the message loud and clear. We would be eager customers.

[drank]

It has been almost 2 years since the first post on this topic and still no solutions exists today! It's a shame. We wanted to use scalix as our company server and to offer scalix-based solutions to our customers but the lack of POP3 support along with the Scalix connector is a real show-stopper for us. We will not use Scalix without this feature, nor will we recommend it to our customers.

Dear Scalix developers and management, please, put the effort to solve this. It is obvious you loose customers without this feature (I've read we're not the first to stop using Scalix because of this).

You may advise us to use the workarounds suggested in this post but they are all BAD workarounds, especially for a customer that just wants to use Outlook for all his mail (fetching and sending).

We will closely monitor how Scalix develops in this area and if you solve this issue we will definitely migrate to Scalix.

Best regards

[mrezzonico]

Does Zimbra-connector have the same problems ?

1) Outlook-connector and POP3 is not possible in the same profile
2) With Outlook-connector and IMAP in the same profile is not possible to use "Send as"


Regards. Miche

[juanfermin]

I have multiple email accounts that I want to run along side Scalix. But here is the problem, if I redirect to mail to a personal folder the Scalix calendar is not shared. If I use the default Scalix location my POP mail disappers into a black hole.

If I can not resolve this I am going to to have to trash the Scalix setup

Wow, I wish I had read this post before setting up Scalix. I didn't realize until AFTER I set it up that you can't have other email accounts delivered into your Scalix box, this is the MAIN reason I was pushing this to my client, because Scalix advertises that they have a FEATURE by FEATURE comparison to Exchage. I downloaded the Zimbra Desktop edition, and that one does have the ability to access multiple external POP or IMAP accounts, if the Server works the same way, I guess I'm going to have to switch to them.

[mikevl]

Hi

Try fetchmail. Works fine

Mike