Zentyal 3.5 Mail retrieval from external accounts

[Skymatix]

Has this feature been removed or must I wait a few days for an update to see this again?

Nico

[J. A. Calvo]

Yes, it was removed as a consequence of the usercorner removal (https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22133.msg85628.html)

[StuartNaylor]

José,

Fetchmail is still there in 3.5 just the external email lists are not linked to users I guess.

Is there anyway we could set up a small script so that we can drop mails into some accounts.

Dunno if everybody is like me but I only need fetchmail for a few accounts. Not having it for those few accounts is actually a big deal.
Guess I could do it the other way and sort out forwarders.

I was just thinking that rather than the whole dev process or waiting for maybe the usercorner to come back we could provide the backbone to a script that could run under cron.

Dovecot holds the mails in maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir

We need something like the below

set daemon 600
 set logfile fetchmail.log

 

Code: [Select]

poll the_isp_mail_server proto POP3
  user "remote_username" pass "PASSWORD=" is "local_username" preconnect "date >> fetchmail.log"
  ssl
  fetchall
  no keep
  no rewrite
  mda "/usr/bin/procmail -f %F -d %T";
Anyone got any bright idea's as I guess we don't need to access ldap just scroll through a user and linked remote mail list.

[Skymatix]

Mr Calvo, thanks for answering this question of mine.

As communicated direct with head office it is a bit of a problem for me as I was really hoping of implementing Zentyal, "as it was", for a specific customer that requires exactly this feature.

At least I now know where I stand and can therefore compensate for this change in the Zentyal package.

[bwf.it35218]

Hi

I to have a problem with the fetchmail module being removed with the user corner module as I was looking at using Zentyal as an onsite mail server for a client that does not have a static IP address on their WAN. The plan was to use fetchmail to retrieve the email from their Email ISP and deliver it to each user account and then use the smart host for sending relay.

Is there any possibility of adding a separate fetchmail config menu in the GUI?

Regards

[Skymatix]

Yes please, I support bwf.it35218.

Please give a way to configure fetchmail in the GUI.

As far as I was concerned the idea of retrieving external mail was one of the BEST ideas in the package and I will miss it dearly if it does not come back.

Anyway if fecthmail is in the system how hard can it be to put a small link in the GUI?

[StuartNaylor]

The great thing about the usercorner was that it was the user corner.

I don't want to be collecting user details.

In fact my users used to get set up with a default password of "password" and it was up to them to change this in the user corner.

External mail accounts that might be theirs, is also something that I don't want to know or deal with.

The user corner is pretty essential for this.

I can't see the user corner being a permanent drop but just a reposition whilst the new samba authentication is used.

Dear Zentyal when do we get a new samba4 usercorner?

There are ways to get round this https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22332.msg86173.html#msg86173

Its taking some time to get things worked out though.
 

[royceb]

I'm with you 90% of the way.  I can see how this might be an issue on the sysadmin side where the email password is tied to your samba/Windows login.  I'm not sure there is a win/win here for password management/usability.

[EddieA]

So, external mail is supported, according to the Technical Features and also the Mail panel.  But it isn't really.   

I find it interesting that the excuse used is the removal of User Corner.  I am currently running 3.0 without User Corner, but all my accounts are configured to retrieve external mail, as that is currently an option on the Users panel.  OK, it's a pain if the external mail password expires, because there is only a way to add or delete an external mail account, not modify, but remove/add sure works for me.

The lack of this feature is a huge roadblock to a deployment of 3.5.

Cheers.

[StuartNaylor]

I have been looking at the fetch mail thing for a couple of weeks now.

The main problem is that these are user details.

My only thought was that if users made fetchmailrc file or at least a simplified one of the remote account details in there home folder we could use this to poll emails.

If that would get us going until a user corner makes a reappearance then yeah. To be honest I am expecting it to be part of the sogo interface and the old user corner is gone.

Personally dovecot has a plugin called fetchmail wakeup http://github.com/marschap/fetchmail_wakeup and this is so much better than polling.

When a user accesses there email it checks external. Mega as the bandwidth saving on large user numbers is huge. But not that clear on how you implement it.

If a simple csv external account file will do please give as a shout and I will give it a go.

I know it can be done just needs a cron job to check the home directories for the fetchmailrc / csv file.

The roundcube client has a external email plugin that after the weekend I will be doing a write up on.

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22563.msg86753.html#msg86753

[StuartNaylor]

Well I had a look and its fairly easy really.

Prob better running fetchmail as a daemon but just as a test  I was running it as root.

so in /root I had a .fetchmailrc

Code: [Select]

set daemon 180
set syslog
set postmaster postmaster@zent1.office.zentyal.lan


poll my.bumbox.com proto POP3
   user "quarkybeddingspot" with password "theansweris42" is test1@zentyal.lan here  ;
That was it really, get your virtual mail domain right and hey presto.

[Torsten73]

So how can i solve to get my mails collected from my mail account for the first time?
All my mails are on the hoster side and not in outlook, earlier i used mail retrieval from external accounts for that (although it was not working as expected and collected mails again and again)

And what i don´t understand, how shall i receive now mails? I can send mails to external adresses, but i have nothing in my inbox when they answer them.

And i can´t see it in the wiki. Here is still explanined the user corner und mail retrieval!

[StuartNaylor]

I guess Zentyal will do something with an interface for this.

Guess the user manager will have this included.

For now its a matter of adding them to /etc/fetchmailrc

Its split over a few posts.

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22602.msg86913.html#msg86913

The manner that you run fetchmail
fetchmail -F -K -L /var/log/fetchmail

Code: [Select]

-K - Delete retrieved messages from the remote mailserver. This option forces retrieved mail to be deleted
   -L - Specify the log file to which fetchmail should log to
   -F - Delete old (previously retrieved) messages from the mailserver before retrieving new messages
Or in the global section of fetchmailrc
nofetchall: Retrieve only new messages (default). If nothing else is specified (e.g. fetchall, keep), this means nofetchall.
fetchall: Fetch all messages whether seen or not.
keep: Don't delete seen messages from server.
nokeep: Delete seen messages from server

sudo man fetchmail will give exacts for the specific version.

Its a pain at the moment but if you need it desparately you will have to do something like in the forum link.

[Torsten73]

It´s more than a pain.  What the heck are they are doing there! Another release (like 3.4) where unsolved main functions have been cutted. This should be an Exchange replacement, nowhere is documented that no external mail connector will be available.

I am very concerned about this decission. And how this will be published.

Only to write that user corner will be moved to contrib, without saying that also some mostly used functions depending on it will be removed it just not kidding. Before my hollidays it was still there. A decission in 3 week, only for getting a release plan in time! I can´t believe that only a few Users needs external mail connectors. Thats a main function.
I say it again, what is a mailserver without receiving Mails! For security reasons and small setups it´s abloute no way without  relay host mail server.

And the best, the documentation is only copied from 3.4 (in this part).

So i must say, get back to it. Other way i must move to other products.  I am not willing to manually configure and add functions which are not upgrade/update stable.