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inlining
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 12:49am | IP Logged Quote inlining

Not a MailBee customer yet but may be soon. I work for an association (abc association) and we provide our members a service where they can sign up for an @abc.org email address but they must provide us their primary email address (yahoo, comcast, etc.). The domain name of our assoc. is also abc.org and all staff in our headquarters therefore have @abc.org emails - obviously, this "service" was not well thought out before being offered....

Currently, our ISP keeps a list of all members that have signed up for this service and filters ALL emails sent to @agd.org - if there is a match, the MailTo: is replaced with the members primary email and the email is re-sent without ever touching our email server.

My question is: Is there a product, MailBee or other, that will allow us to perform this service in house? Ideally, we would set this up on a server running SMTP to handle the "filtering" of all email before it reaches our email server. Thanks for reading this lengthy post and your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Patrick
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Alex
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 7:41am | IP Logged Quote Alex

All our products communicate with SMTP servers. Catching mail before it reaches SMTP server is not possible.

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Alex
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Patrick
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 9:38am | IP Logged Quote Patrick

I see, then is it possible to hold the mail in the queue until it has been run against this database for matches before sending it on it's way? Or are you aware of any other way to accomplish what I've described??

Thanks again,
Patrick
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Alex
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 10:04am | IP Logged Quote Alex

What's possible is the following solution:

- All "@abc.org " mails arrive to "wild-card" mailbox (e.g. *@abc.org mailbox). Most mail servers do support such mailboxes

- Periodically running script fetches all mails from wild-card mailbox, runs each of them against database for matches and then resends to proper address. Each mail is deleted from wild-card after begin processed.

Alternatively, if mail server does not support wild-card mailboxes, the script can examine the list of mailboxes (where each mailbox is jonh@abc.org, bob@abc.org, etc.)

This approach can be implemented with MailBee. The one should just develop a simple script which will extract mail, run a query and resend it. To periodically run the script, any scheduler can be used (such as MS SQL Server's Agent).

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Alex
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patrick
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 11:01am | IP Logged Quote patrick

That sounds logical but if we want the screening to take place on another server before being passed on to our Exchange server, how would we set up a wild card mailbox on the SMTP server? I guess I'm Will SMTP running on a server other than our email server support the wild card *@agd.org mailbox.

With re: to your Alternative solution, when you say "the
script can examine the list of mailboxes (where each mailbox is john@abc.org, bob@agd.org,)" do you mean the list of mailboxes of our staff at Headquarters on our Exchange server OR do you mean the database file with the list of member email addresses (both @abc.org and the members forwarding email address?) I ask because we want to avoid setting up a mailbox on our Exchange server for each member that signs up for this service - currently about 650 members.

Thanks a lot for your time on this,
Patrick
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Alex
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 12:15pm | IP Logged Quote Alex

Quote:
guess I'm Will SMTP running on a server other than our email server support the wild card *@agd.org mailbox


Is there a problem with wild card mailbox on another server? I'm not sure I understood correctly this part of the posing.

Quote:
do you mean the list of mailboxes of our staff at Headquarters on our Exchange server OR do you mean the database file with the list of member email addresses (both @abc.org and the members forwarding email address?)

Both categories. So (in "no-wild-card mailbox scenario"), front-end server will hold accounts for all members and the stuff. Only those mails which correspond to your staff will be redirected to internal Exchange server. Thus, front-end server will have much more accounts than Exchange one, but these accounts will be empty most of the time (since they are constantly polled and cleared). However, constant polling of hundreds accounts is not very good from the perfomance point. Wild-card mailbox is still preferred.

Also, there is a completely different solution. Consider mail server dropping all incoming mail for 'abc.org' domain into 'Drop' directory. For example, IIS SMTP service can behave like this. Then, there is a periodically running script which scans this directory, imports messages from files into mail messages (MailBee can do this), runs database query and then resends messages to the proper addresses, deleting files from 'Drop' folder. In fact, we get some kind of mail queue dispatcher.

Regards,
Alex
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inlining
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 1:56pm | IP Logged Quote inlining

Oops, typo in that first quote, what I meant to say was I guess I'm just unsure about the setup of a "wild card" mailbox. Would this be on the front end server doing the filtering and running SMTP or our Exchange server?

Also, which MailBee product would suit the wild card mailbox solution (MailBee SMTP?) and which would import messages from files into mail messages as in the last solution you mention. From what I've seen, MailBee seems to have the widest array of SMTP solutions.

Thanks
Patrick
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Alex
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Posted: 01 December 2004 at 9:59pm | IP Logged Quote Alex

Wild-card mailbox should be set on the front end server doing the filtering.

To process mails from wild-card mailbox, MailBee POP3 and MailBee SMTP components required. POP3 will extract mail from wild-card mailbox, and then messages will be resent with SMTP component.

In "import messages from files" scenario, only SMTP component is required.

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Alex
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inlining
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Posted: 02 December 2004 at 12:22pm | IP Logged Quote inlining

Thank you very much Alex! I spoke with our ISP and found out they use SendMail and have modified its configuration to perform this filtering. MailBee looks to be a more reasonable alternative.

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Patrick
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Alex
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Posted: 02 December 2004 at 12:28pm | IP Logged Quote Alex

Ok. Please let us know if any futher assistance is needed.

Regards,
Alex
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