Setup Email Server with ISP Domain
 

We need to setup a mail server for a small company with around 10 mail users using Fedora Core 4. The system details are:

1) We have a domain ( e.g. mycompany.com ) that recieves all mails being sent to that domain at our ISP.

3) We have configured couple of mail accounts on ISP's mail server for critical users who wanted immediate mailing facility.

4) We want to use Zimbra as our local mail server.

5) Our plan is to create a single user account at our ISP which will receive all the emails to it except for those critical users.

2) Then we want to poll that mailbox with fetchmail and then distribute those mails (according to the usernames in the domain, e.g. userone@mycompany.com, usertwo@mycompany.com., etc.) to the correct user on our local network, e.g. userone, usertwo, etc. They will use windows XP with Microsoft outlook clients with POP mail protocol.

3)Also, we want to send out our emails from this server.

4) We have already installed Fedora Core 4 with zimbra mail server (Release 4.5.11_GA_1751.FC4_20080128130403 FC4 FOSS edition) . We use ADSL to access Internet and our ISP mailbox.

Could somebody please help us in achieving this with some detail information something like how to guide? Thank you very much in advance.

I am new to zimbra as well as configuring mail server.

I am sorry to bother you guys if this issue is being already discussed, but I was unable to search it.

Important information :
1) we have a static public IP address.
2) I have configured domain as well here is zone file:

ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.
webmail.ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.

localhost IN A 127.0.0.1
webmail A 192.168.1.190

The local domain (ourcompany.com) which I set is actually a public domain which we have registered.
I have installed zimbra and I am able to send mail within our LAN to different user @ourcompany.com.

ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.
webmail.ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.

i'm a rookie starting my own company (high-end hardware audio mixers) and am a rookie so take with a grain of salt. that having been said i'll refer you to wikipedia for the MX entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record

the MX record is the sequence in which mail servers should be tried. for example, if you name one MX->10 and a second MX as 20 then MX 10 will be tried FIRST and MX 20 will be tried second. right now you have email trying to be routed to two servers at the same time! for the record, the MX values does not matter as long as there is a clear order :-) one MX could be 1, and another 37, so long as the order is clear to you (keeping them spaced 10 apart aids in future administration (adding another server as 15 (for example means not having to mess with anyting already set up and working properly))

as for the rest, i hope someone could step up and help as my limited experience fails me.

good luck

Thanks for your reply!!! The webmail.ourcompany.com. and ourcompany.com. are different domains. While installing zimbra, it takes the hostname as it's default domain. After installation we have to create the domain of our choice.

Just be aware that FC 4 is no longer supported, the current versions are 7,8 with 9 due out RSN.

Thanks for your update. I am using FC 4 just for our test installation. Once we are done with setup we are planning to migrate it to either FC 8 or RHEL 5.

Hi Guys,

I was able to setup the small email infrastructure using zimbra. Zimbra is really good.

I have done followings to setup the email server:

1) I configured split dns (I think it's a split dns). We have one registered domain say "mycompany.com". We have our web and mail server hosted at ISP. I created "mycompany.com" in our LAN. I installed zimbra on a fedora 4 box with hostname "webmail". Our zone file is as follows:

ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.
webmail.ourcompany.com. IN MX 10 webmail.ourcompany.com.

localhost IN A 127.0.0.1
webmail A 192.168.1.190

2) We created a catch-all account at our ISP mail server. We configured fetchmail to fetch all the emails from catch all account and then to distribute them to respective zimbra mail boxes.

.fetchmailrc file is as follows:

poll mail.mycompany.com localdomains mycompany.com
proto pop3
no dns
user catch_all@mycompany.com password 'password' to * here


3) To send mail we changed the "Relay MTA for external delivery" to "mail.mycompany.com". "mail.mycompany.com" is our ISP's mail server.

I used the post Zimbra SMTP relay configuration to use the ISP's relay host to send mail. I used catch_all accounts authentication for sending mail.


I am able to send mail to other domains easily like yahoo, google, aol.
I am able to receive mails from internet.

But I have a big problem. We have couple of other important mailboxes hosted at ISP (@mycompany.com) .I am able to receive mails sent from those accounts in zimbra, but I am unable to send mail to those accounts. Mails are bounced back. I think Zimbra tries to locate the user in local zimbra mail server as it does not find the account it bounces back the mail.

Please let me know if I have to change some dns or zimbra settings for sending mails to those accounts.

Thanks!!!!!