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

[Ian M. <ia...@in...>]

Frederic, Thanks for responding,

Mail is currently delivered to exchange. They are migrating to a linux
server. No external boxes involved. This requires a visit to each and
every desktop to modify the mail client, so the migration will take some
time (multiple remote offices too to complicate matters) and will have
to be done mailbox by mailbox. 

Step one will be switch the mx record to deliver email to the linux
server by default. Easy.

Once email is arriving on the linux box, fetchmail is used to pull it
out and redeliver it to the exchange server. Again easy.

When a users mail client is switched from exchange to using pop3 against
the linux server the pull-from-linux-push-to-exchange will be switched
off for their mailbox. 

However the problem is that internal users will continue to send email
via exchange, which will deliver to the now unmonitored exchange
mailbox.

What I want to do is pull any mail which may arrive out of the exhange
mailbox and deliver it to the users mailbox on the linux box. However
since users change their passwords, and its not a good idea, I didn't
want to make a big list of each user account and their password just to
achieve this.

I was hoping either pop3 or imap would have an authentication type which
would allow me to do something like

Fetch mail using user administrator password asecret from mailbox
johndoe on server 1.2.3.4 deliver to smtpserver 1.2.3.5


Ian Murphy
Integra XP
http://www.integra-xp.com
00 34 94 621 5265
 

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Frederic Marchal [mailto:fre...@wo...] 
Enviado el: viernes, 23 de junio de 2006 11:49
Para: Ian Murphy
CC: fet...@li...
Asunto: Re: [fetchmail-users] Accessing user mailbox from another
account

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