Can I accept and forward mail at the same time?

[bcarruthers]

Hi,

I am just completing a small business installation of scalix for my work. We used to used Thunderbird with postfix/courier-imap but now we are moving back to outlook.

What I want to do is start using the new scalix server to accept mail but also forward mail to the old server so our existing clients work.

One more slight complication is that I run Mailscanner and Spamassassin with scalix using SMTPFILTER=TRUE. This is working great (at least from the test emails I have done).

Is this possible or should I bite the bullet and upgrade 25 clients in one day?

Thanks,
Brett

[kanderson]

With 25 users, you'd be best to just upgrade them all at the same time.

Having said that, you COULD, use your old server as the primary, so all mail is delivered to it. Then on the Scalix server, use fetchmail to pull the email for the migrated people over to Scalix. Don't create any unmigrated users. Set sendmail to use your old server as a smarthost, so all outbound mail will go to the old server, and then (potentially) out to the internet from there.

Kev.

[florian]

or setup scalix as your primary and use the admin resource toolkit sxaa command to setup forwards for all the users.

Florian.

[kanderson]

But if you have the same email address on both machines, Scalix/Sendmail won't forward it.

IE: if kanderson@junk.com is the address on Scalix, and the old server also gathers mail for kanderson@junk.com, SXAA won't forward it, because it will assume kanderson@junk.com is local to the Scalix box. Fetchmail gets around that for retreiving mail, and as long as the user doen't exist on the Scalix box, sendmail will try to relay the message out. By default, local-host-names will be blank, and the message will be passed to the smarthost, which would be the corret server for unmigrated users, such as, florian@junk.com.

It's a bit of a hack, and it relies on a sendmail misconfiguration, but it's the easiest thing I've found, and at least 80% of the servers I come across have sendmail misconfigured so that it just works.

Kev.

[florian]

sure. i would always do this using domain aliases though.

i would add "tempbox.domain.com" as another "local-host-name" to the non-scalix box. Then i would set the forwards to go to florian@tempbox.domain.com

To me that still feels less awkward than the fetchmail thing which is something i'm trying to avoid unless you really have to pickup data from an ISP somewhere out there.

But then... probably a matter of preference.

Cheers,
Florian.

[kanderson]

Chances are your solution scales better. I've seen that fetchmail for a couple of hundred users can stretch well over an hour, and the delays in email eventually become unacceptable because of it. Since fetchmail is single threaded, and doesn't allow several instances to be run concurrently, this is a real problem on a bigger migration. You've seen far more of those that I have, which would explain your preference for "do it right", even if it's arguably more work.

Having said all of this, with 25 users, I'd bite the bullet and do them all at the same time. It will be easier, and it really won't take that long anyway.

Kev.

[bcarruthers]

I bit the bullet as I needed to get the new server up and going. I used imapsync to sync all the folders to scalix before I moved over. Then I changed my firewall smtp forward rule to the new scalix machine and did one final imapsync that night.

I've got problems which I'm about to post in a new message in the installation forum.

Thanks,
Brett