How to create email groups in Lion server?

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Level 1

8 points

How to create email groups in Lion server?

Hello,

We've migrated from a Microsoft Exchange environment to a Lion server. One of the things we're having trouble with is getting email groups to work consistently.

We're trying to duplicate the "distribution group" functionality of Exchange.

The only thing that has worked (sometimes) so far, is for us to add a user - such as 'managers', and then log into webmail to create a filter that forwards the mail to the necessary addresses. This would be suitable for our needs, but it doesn't always work. We've got some that work, others that stopped working, and others still that never have worked. The emails sent to those addresses always seem to be delivered to the mailbox, just not always forwarded out.

We've checked the forwarding rules and they are all consistent with the functional accounts.

Can anyone offer some help on how we can make this work more consistently? Perhaps a different way? Mailman is not what we're looking for.

Thanks for your help, and have a happy holiday!

Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 23, 2011 12:06 PM

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Answer 1

tArre

Level 1

85 points

Nov 24, 2011 6:06 AM in response to sirsimonm

don't know if this is the best way, but it will do similar funtionallity.

1) you can configure a new account, let's call it "admin_group".

2) then you can configure an email for this account in Workgroup Manager, let's say it's "admin_group@yourdomain.com".

3) log into your Webmail with that "admin_group" account

go into Configuration > Filters

4) there you can configure filters that can do almost the same as "distribution groups".

Any mail can be forwarded to other(s), and then it can be deleted or stored.

Let me know if you find a better solution!

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Answer 2

Nov 25, 2011 5:28 AM in response to sirsimonm

Mac OS X Server uses Postfix as the underlying mail server. Apple don't make such configuring easily accessible and you therefore would have to dive in and manually edit the Postfix configuration files.

Due to this, a lot of people instead use Kerio Connect Mail Server. This can do everything Apple's Mail Server can do and a lot more and has a tool that makes it easy to setup things like this.

If you still want to go the Apple route, have a look at this site http://www.topology.org/linux/postfix_virtual2.html and read the linked articles. It basically boils down to setting up alias rules.

Arguably, even MS Exchange is easier to deal with - what on earth is the world coming to when that is true!

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Answer 3

Nov 26, 2011 6:33 PM in response to tArre

I tried this using the "redirect" in the filters ... but can you put in more then one email address, using perhaps commas to seperate, ie

user1@domain.com,user2@domain.com,user3@domain3.com

etc?

David

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Answer 4

Nov 28, 2011 2:53 AM in response to david_dodell

There seems to be at least three different similar configs for postfix and I suspect all three could be used to accomplish the goal, these being an alias file, a virtual_alias file, and a group_alias file.

However I have now found the following which might be a better approach for you, it uses a script to automatically generate a postfix group based on a Workgroup Manager group. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2711188?start=0&tstart=0

In answer to your quesiton, yes you can add multiple members to an alias, the format is basically

aliasname membr1@example.com member2@example.com

This other article might also be helpful

http://www.bynari.net/support/users/kb.php?id=200049

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Answer 5

sirsimonm Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 15, 2011 3:54 PM in response to sirsimonm

Hi all,

Thanks for your suggestions. I haven't had success in getting the postfix alias stuff going. I'm sure I have something a bit off.

For everyone's reference, I did learn one thing:

Dovecot has an in-built limitation of 4 forwarding addressses. The developers did this to prevent huge forward lists from killing the server, but it is a pain. In some of their discussion groups you can see that they talked about making it so you could edit one of the conf file settings to '0' for unlimited forwards, but I'm not sure if it was implemented. I'll try it later on when the server is not being hit hard.

DJ

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