Re: [fetchmail-users] Accessing user mailbox from another account

[Frederic M. <fre...@wo...>]

Ian Murphy wrote:
> I have been charged with migrating an exchange 2000 instalation to a 
> linux server and am using fetchmail to handle interopability during 
> the migration period.
>  
> I am currently re-delivering email that arrives on the linux box to 
> MSExchange via smtp and its working like a dream.
>  
> I now need to be able to pull new email from the exchange server and 
> deliver it to the linux server. To avoid the need to know the users 
> passwords I want to give read/write access rights to their mailboxes 
> to a special account and to read all the mailboxes using a single 
> priviliged account.
>  
> Now, my problem, what is this type of access called ? I've been 
> looking at the fetchmail documentation for pop3 and imap access and am 
> lost in the sea of authentication types and options, though it seems 
> pretty likely that it is possible.
>  
> Can anyone steer me in the right direction ?

I don't understand your current configuration and what you want to 
achieve, especially, the part about what server is downloading what kind 
of mail and from where...

Depending on the way I read your mail, I understand one of the two 
following things:

1) You have both a linux *and* an msexchange server fetching inbound 
e-mails from an outside server (your ISP for instance) and you want to 
synchronize the e-mails between the two servers so that your users can 
use any server.

2) Your mails are processed by the msexchange server which act now as a 
relay for the linux server and you want your users to migrate at their 
leisure from this server to the linux server before you decommission the 
msexchange server and make the linux server your main mail server.

Since case 2 seems more likely, I'll answer this one for now.

If your idea is to read all the mailboxes of all the users from one 
account on the msexchange server and deliver them to the proper user 
account on the linux server, then I don't think it is possible (at least 
not with pop3 or imap but maybe with a samba connection and some 
cron/bash scripts).

You have either to divert a copy of each incoming mail on the msexchange 
server to one account on that server and read that single account with 
fetchmail (provided your msexchange server adds the proper information 
such as a X-Envelope header) or you have to forward the mails of each 
user to the linux server using the msexchange equivalent to a .forward 
file on linux (I don't know what that mechanism could be because I don't 
know msechange).

Frederic