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

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

Ian Murphy wrote:
> 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.
>   

Something is missing here... Why do you need fetchmail to do this ?
Don't you have one account per user with one password for each user on
the linux server ? It seems to me that this part you have got running
faces the same problem you are asking a solution for ? Fetchmail must
download the mails from the user's mailbox and it must know about all
the user names and passwords... How did you got it running ?

BTW, here, a .forward file per user would be perfect and more reliable
than fetchmail... If your server is running usermin, the user can even
remove the redirection by himself when he starts fetching his mails on
the linux server.

> 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
>   

No. As far as I know, imap and pop3 provide access to one and only one
mailbox and more specifically to the mailbox that was named during the
authentication. In fact, you don't provide a user name with some rights
attached to it when you use pop3 or imap. You provide the name of a
mailbox. (Somebody fix this if I'm wrong !)

But that doesn't mean you have to create the dreaded list of
user/password now...

Can you tell exchange to redirect the mails of the users that already
moved to the linux server ? I'm thinking about an alias or something
like that to an internal server name such as us...@li....
That domain would be considered local by the linux server and the
exchange server would just have to know the route to that server.

Or could you divert the mails of those users to a single account on the
exchange server and fetch the mails from that account ?

Frederic