local delivery not so local

[msmcknight]

Hi everyone,

My zimbra server is sending emails that are local to the external relay. It would seem to me that emails with addresses that match a domain that zimbra is hosting should never leave the server.

My zimbra domain is like zimbra.example.com, with email addresses reflected as user@example.com. Could that subtle difference cause the problem? If so, how can I fix it? We have another inbound server that handles example.com from the internet, but it would still be nice if zimbra understood it was local/internal.

How can I set zimbra to keep all example.com emails internal, but let others go to the external relay?

Thanks for any help you can offer,
-Michael

[JDunphy]

There is probably a few ways... I have my zimbra server think mail.example.com and example.com are local domains. My mail gateway with the MX records forwards email to mail.example.com.

In that configuration, you would define example.com and mail.example.com aliases for each user and then create the domain example.com just like you have created for your mail.example.com domain.

Note: I did this with my first zimbra installation before reading any documentation so this method could be convoluted given all the changes that have occurred over the years. I came from sendmail so I make things harder. I did it because I wanted something I was familiar with in front of the zimbra to do extra security and tagging of email via various milters, etc. That eventually means I have to do custom spamassassin rules to pull that information in to the zimbra scoring. Now, I would probably just have zimbra handle it all with a multi server configuration so it's tightly integrated... but it works well nonetheless.

[msmcknight]

Thanks for the reply. I think I probably have a similar setup as you, for many of the same old-school sendmail reasons.

When I was looking into this, I found info on "domain aliases" -- I wasn't familiar with them, but it solved my problem.

Here's some info, for others fighting the same fight...

Video: Add Domain Alias on Zimbra Mail Server
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mp06FXZ5xk

Wiki Article
https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Managing_Domains