Forwarding email and must keep a copy..

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Level 1

5 points

Forwarding email and must keep a copy..

I handle a lot of corporate email with user that have blackberry's, etc., and am required to forward and retain copies in there in box. My other servers have third party solutions, but I'm trying to get away from that because of the upgrade headaches every time a new OS X version is released.

Is there any way possible to set a virtual user to forward an email and retain a copy in his/her inbox? I've searched high and low, and what is just a click on other mail server software, doesn't seem to be available on mail for Snow Leopard. Any mod that can be made?

Mini Server, Mac OS X (10.6.6), Xserve 10.4 Xserve 10.5

Posted on Feb 23, 2011 5:06 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Camelot

Level 9

55,287 points

Feb 23, 2011 8:17 PM in response to MO_Mule

It isn't quite clear what you're trying to do here. I get that you want to keep copies of messages, but not quite how... what do you mean, for example by "... retain copies in there in box". The message is delivered to their InBox but could be moved out of there by a mail rule, or even deleted by the user. You can't forcibly keep the message in the InBox (that kind of negates the point of the inbox in the first place).

If you just want to copy all incoming mail that's easy to do, and there are several ways of doing it. If just for specific users I'd probably look at postfix's aliases setup, whereby you can map one address to another location (or set of locations). This makes it easy to replicate mail for specific users.

If you want all mail for all recipients to be replicated then there are other postfix options that can copy mail, such as always_bcc which will blindly copy every message running through the server, although this may not be practical if you want to break out the messages by recipient (for that use the recipient bccmaps option).

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Answer 2

MO_Mule Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 24, 2011 7:01 AM in response to Camelot

Your close... Basically, if an email comes in for user@example2.com, which is a virtual host, I want it to go to that users inbox, as well as forwarded on to another account(ie: a blackberry account for their push notification). Now multiply that times about 200 users all forwarding to different accounts, as well as keeping a copy in their inbox for their retrieval when they get back to their office. They still control everything related to the email in their accounts, they just require forwarding to their other accounts as well for some other purpose(mobility etc.)

Currently, the workgroup manager only allows a forward, and that's it. The docs mention Sieve, but state that it does not work for the virtual host aliases. Having two accounts with different names so it forwards to account 2, and to wherever else is just stupid, and unworkable in the corporate world. That would require two email addresses for everyone of these users.

So do postfix aliases handle this specifically? ... and if so where would I find this procedure?.. also, when the server is upgraded, will this will probably be overwritten, and continually be a problem in the future?

This is a fairly standard procedure on any other mail server.

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Answer 3

Camelot

Level 9

55,287 points

Feb 24, 2011 8:55 AM in response to MO_Mule

So do postfix aliases handle this specifically?

Yes, Postfix aliases can do this.

and if so where would I find this procedure?

in the (mostly awful) Postfix documentation.

Specifically, you need to create an alias map that identifies the recipient address followed by a list of addresses to relay to, e.g.:

/etc/aliases:
joe: joe, someaddress@someotherdomain.com

This will take any mail addressed to 'joe' and create two copies - one stored in Joe's mailbox and one forwarded to someaddress@someotherdomain.com.

You should then run newaliases to compile the list into a lookup table that Postfix can read. IIRC it's preset to look for /etc/aliases, so you shouldn't need to do anything more.

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