Forwarding Your Zimbra Domains
On one of my Zimbra servers I’ve got a customer with about 8 domains. They are going to be migrating two of their domains elsewhere. While they do this, they want their old email still accessible on the old server. The problem is that if the old domains still exist on the old server and they send mail using any of the remaining domains, it will attempt to be delivered on the local old server. What we need to do is forward the domains.
I found some documentation that said you simply need to add this forwarder:
1 2 3 4 | zmprov md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllAddress @example.com md example.com zimbraMailCatchAllForwardingAddress @example.com md example.com zimbraMailTransport smtp:other-mta.domain.com |
This adds the forwarder to the domain itself…which should work great, right?…wrong. What this does is make adjustments to LDAP. So after applying this and testing without success I checked LDAP. The entry was there for the domain, but I found that each mailbox had its own “zimbraMailTransport” entry pointing to the local server. This user attribute was overriding my domain setting. To repair this I did the following:
First connect to your Zimbra server via LDAP. Highlight the domain you need to make the adjustment for and click on tools and export. This will spit out an LDIF file that we will be parsing.
I then used this autoit script to parse the file grabbing user accounts and editing their names into email addresses:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 | #include <file.au3>
$WriteMe = ""
Dim $aLDIF
If Not _FileReadToArray("C:\Users\Greg\Desktop\Customers\lifeagape\whatever.ldif",$aLDIF) Then
MsgBox(4096,"Error", " Error reading log to Array error:" & @error)
Exit
EndIf
For $x = 1 to $aLDIF[0]
if StringInStr("111" & $aLDIF[$x],"dn:") > 0 Then
;found user
$ChangeToEmail = StringReplace($aLDIF[$x],"dn: uid=", "")
$ChangeToEmail = StringReplace($ChangeToEmail, ",ou=people,dc=", '@')
$ChangeToEmail = StringReplace($ChangeToEmail, ",dc=", ".")
$WriteMe = $WriteMe & @CRLF & $ChangeToEmail
EndIf
if StringInStr("111" & $aLDIF[$x],"mail:") > 0 Then
$WriteMe = $WriteMe & "," & StringReplace($aLDIF[$x], "mail: ", "")
EndIf
if StringInStr("111" & $aLDIF[$x],"zimbraMailAlias:") > 0 Then
$WriteMe = $WriteMe & "," & StringReplace($aLDIF[$x], "zimbraMailAlias: ", "")
EndIf
if StringInStr("111" & $aLDIF[$x],"zimbraMailTransport:") > 0 Then
$WriteMe = $WriteMe & "," & StringReplace($aLDIF[$x], "zimbraMailTransport: ", "")
EndIf
Next
$fTheFile = FileOpen("C:\Users\Greg\Desktop\Customers\lifeagape\whatever.csv", 1)
; Check if file opened for writing OK
If $fTheFile = -1 Then
MsgBox(0, "Error", "Unable to open file.")
Exit
EndIf
FileWriteLine($fTheFile, $WriteMe)
FileClose($fTheFile) |
Last I used notepad++ to modify the desired records to look like this:
1 | zmprov ma example@emailaddr.com zimbraMailTransport smtp:newlocation.mxrecord.net |
Hi Greg,
Thousand thanks for this post. I had been googling everywhere for the solution on this. We just migrated several of the many domains in our zimbra server to other hosting provider. But we keep the domains as backup to old emails as we do not want to migrate all of the mails. Problem arises as email sent from other domain in the same server got routed internally and did not reach the new live hosting email.
There are lots of unanswered variation of this issue in StackOverflow and zimbra forum. I also stumbled on the forwarder solution using catchall address but not working us.
Finally found your article and it solved it. Although in our case is easier as we keep the list of migrated users in database and just using SQL to compose the zmprov command for the users.
This might be old post but its still valueable nonetheless especially for email migration. Thank you so much.
@MD, glad you found value in the article 🙂